
In Dark

I

Like everyone else, Ot has always at the back of her mind an
image of the world.  The image is small but clear, distant
but entirely distinct.  It is clearer than a memory, less
present than a vision.

The world floats alone in the darkness.  The darkness is a
deep darkness, and far away in the darkness are the stars.
The stars are fixed and unblinking.  Between and among the
stars move the other stars.  Some of these are flashes of
light lasting less than an eyeblink, some are long streaks
of orange flame, and fifteen are faithful performers,
moving in an intricate dance unimaginably distant.

The stars and the other stars dot the blackness both in
the real sky, and in the background of the image in Ot's
mind and in everyone else's mind.

The shape of the world, as it floats alone in the dark,
is the shape of a huge lizard, its four legs splayed out,
its thick tail curving gently upward, its great eyes
closed and its mouth slightly open, the sharp white teeth
barely parted.

Within the image of the world in her mind, Ot senses where
in the world, where on the world, she is.  She is, as she
always is, in the great complex atop the Head, the complex
that spreads in halls and rooms in every direction, the only
structure or artifact visible on the surface of the world
from the distance of the mental image, forming a low
circular crown for the lizard as it floats eyes closed
between the stars.

Ot is seated on a broad flat cushion in one of the
roofless rooms at the top of the complex, her neat
grey sinuous legs folded under her, listening to Coth,
her third mentor, rehearsing to her her future and her
duties for the dozenth time.

"When the Architor says that you are ripe for it, you will
go into seclusion.  After seclusion, you will be cleansed,
and taken to the central Innerness, and you will go into the
Innerness and come out again.  Later, you will have a child.
The Architors will take the child, and later the child will
return as a youth, and will join us on the Head."

Ot sighs.  Her hands are clenched tightly into balls, and
pain from them flows up her arms and around her neck, but
she sighs quietly, as though relaxed.  The pain is familiar
and comforting.

"And how will I enter the Innerness?"  She has become used
to speaking of these things with Coth, things that are otherwise
never mentioned in open conversation; Innerness and children, and
the hooded Architors.  But still the fingers of her hands wind
themselves into bundles, and squeeze, and there is sweet
and bitter pain.

"You will enter the Innerness," Coth replies as always,
"head foremost, going slowly in until the Innerness
surrounds you entirely, and then you will emerge.
But," and here her voice changes, or Ot thinks it
does, "you need not fear this; the Innerness does not
smother or harm.  You will emerge without distress."

Now Ot says, as before, patiently, "I shall enter the
Innerness feet first, and I shall enter only up to
my shoulders.  Then I shall emerge, and have a child,
and I shall keep the child myself to raise into a
youth."  As she says it she squeezes her hands still
tighter, and releases them, and squeezes them again.

Coth rubs her forehead.  She begins to speak, and stops.
She sighs deeply.  But then, and she has not done this
before, she rises, and looks away from Ot, and says with
an interesting heat in her voice, "Are we cats, or rodents,
then?", and she walks quickly away, disappearing behind
a screen of vines hanging from a sculpted burl.  Ot
bites at her lips, forces her hands to relax, and watches
her go.  She falls back onto the cushion, her arms
limp and flexible by her sides, her fingers uncoiling.

The central Innerness is at the heart of the Complex,
in the largest of the hot under-rooms, roofed off from
the darkness and the stars, pressed against the heat of
the skin of the world.  Like all Innernesses, it is a
break in the world's skin, a window into red heat and
pulsing wetness, warded by the Architors and tended by
their tenders.

Ot has heard of other Innernesses, somewhere outside the
complex out on the open skin, that are urged and allowed
to heal and close, that their Architors prevent anyone from
approaching, that are covered with sheets of exudate until
they vanish.  But here on the head of the lizard there is
only the one Innerness.  It is kept open and tended for
the use of the complex, and her mentors have said, or
the Architors have said, that soon it will be for her.

The tenders keep the complex Innerness open with fluids,
and heat, and cold, and secret methods that they teach to
no one.  The skin of the world is tough but biddable.
It can be urged to swell and grow, made to tighten and
shrink, made soft or hard, open or closed, and of course
when ripe it is easily made, by even the untrained, to yield
up chewable pieces of itself as food.

The cushion that Ot lies upon is a burl of skin, coaxed
up and softened from the thick living membrane that is the
floor of the room.  The roofed under-rooms below her are
pockets in the skin, formed in a time before living memory
by long patient training of the skin up and over and around.
Burls are brought up from the floor as posts and poles, for
the vines to hang from and for clothes to be put into.  Out
away from the complex, Ot has heard, the skin is untrained
and various, rough in patches and smooth in patches, here
sharp and here shiny, bent mirrors on the skin of the
wilderness.

In Ot's rooms she has her own mirrors, brought forth from
the walls by the artisans.  In her mirrors she sees her
face, the eyes small, the lips graceful and dark, and
above her eyes thin tendrils waving in the air.  Her eyes
are closed now.  The pain in her hands and arms and neck
is subsiding slowly as she wills the muscles to relax.
She feels the pain draining away to fatigue, and nods
to herself, satisfied.  Carefully she moves her lip from
between her teeth.

Earlier, before the Architor in her dark hood came to
Ot's mentors and spoke to them about ripeness and seclusion
and cleansing, Ot spent long strands of time at the edge
of the complex Innerness, when the tenders would allow her
to, watching the deep pulsing redness, and feeling the
heat against the smooth grey skin of her face.

At first she was shy of the tenders, thinking them naturally
as silent and frightening and serious as the Architors,
but then one had spoken to her, and she had replied, and
in time she had come to think of them as only lonely, and
unused to talking, for who besides Ot would come to
the Innerness, and who besides Ot would speak to a
tender?

"Is the Innerness very deep?" she had asked once, sitting
in the hot room, watching a tender spread some pungent
chemical on the gnarled lip of skin.  This tender was the
first she had spoken with, and though they had not
exchanged names, she felt entirely comfortable.

"All Innernesses are deep, as the world is deep.  But,"
and Ot wondered if here the tender was close to telling
secrets that she was sworn to keep, "this one we train
to narrow tightly three yards down, so no one can be
lost."  And though tenders of course speak entirely
naturally of the Innerness, Ot thought she heard a
catch in this one's voice, on the word "lost".

So she did not ask exactly what it meant.  She only stared
harder into the swelling redness, and imagined herself
lost in it, trapped, carried down into the Innerness
below all Innernesses, and she shuddered.  But she
came back all the sooner.

Once, lying boldly on her stomach on the ground (the warm
skin of the world) near but not too near the central
Innerness, she had smelled something, and felt a bit
of more intense warmth under her hip, and curling downward
had found a crack, a sharp and steaming opening the size
of her finger, her own tiny Innerness connected (as she
saw, looking at it more carefully) to the big central
one by a hairline fracture, an almost-tear, as though
it were trying to bud off on its own account.

She had put her nose to the edge of the small crack
and breathed the heat, and she had put her finger
next to the edge of the narrow strip of redness and
nearly touched it.  It looked at once liquid and
tough, essentially the same as the big Innerness looked
from her spot on the edge of the platform watching the
tenders, but somehow different here so close up.

Then she had heard the Architor who stood scowling above
her, and turned her head up to look, and the Architor
had scolded her in a loud voice (whose words she could
never remember afterward, but whose tone stayed with her
forever), and she had fled, and not come back for many
long stretches of time.

The heat of the world, the generous warmth flowing out
through the skin, has always fascinated her.  Her second
mentor, the one charged with her education as to facts
and manners, answered her questions and gave her books,
told her that the heat comes from within, from (saying
it quickly and turning away afterward) the deep Innerness,
that the heat is, along with the light of the stars
and the other stars, what lets people see, and what
gives energy to the plants and the creatures of the
world.

She loves the warmth, but also sometimes fears it, and is
glad to be in the complex on the Head, for there she can
go to the upper roofless rooms where the heat is less,
and when she is tired she can lie on her back on the cool
rough surface and look up at the stars.  She imagines
that out beyond the Head, on the open skin, people must
rest always with the heat at their backs.  It would
distract, she thinks, from the beauty of the stars.

Her second mentor gave her a book about the stars and
the other stars.  The book described an elaborate system
that had been worked out long before the book was written,
for recording and predicting the motions of the fifteen
other stars that move faithfully out in the dark.  Ot
was for a time completely absorbed by this book.  The
system, it said, could be used to divide time into many
fine equal pieces, more accurately than the length of
time that one could walk before needing to rest, or the
time it took the skin of the world to produce enough
food to feed a person.

It had, the book said, once been popular to use the system
to divide time into these pieces, like the bones in an
arm or the pieces of an exudate, and give names to these
pieces, so that strands of time could be pinned and marked,
and talked about as though they were things.  But something
had happened, some failure of the system or some rebellion,
and it had been abandoned.

Ot never quite understood it, how time could be made into
pieces and given names, but she had somehow loved the idea
anyway, and carried the book with her for a long stretch,
putting it under her head while resting, and looking up at
the stars.

Now as her pain withdraws from her fingers and her hands and
her arms and her shoulders, back into her mind for the next
time she has need of it, Ot opens her eyes lying on the
cushion and looks up at the stars.  Just above her, between
one group of stars and the next, one of the other stars
appears.  It has either just appeared, or her eyes have
just found it.  It is a bright star, deeper in color than
most, and moving slowly in an arc.  As she watches it, it
seems to fade just as her pain fades, becoming dimmer and
harder to notice, until she realizes that it, and the pain,
are gone, although she did not notice either one cease.

II

Ot walks out into the complex from her rooms, to bathe.
Those places where the artisans can coax water from the
skin of the head are few, though not as few as the
Innernesses, and Ot knows of none near the place where she
eats and rests and speaks with her mentors.

The complex is mazy and various, the shapes of its rooms
and halls and squares and gardens shaped by the fickle
biddability of the skin, by the whims and fashions of
the artisans, the obscure pronouncements of the Architors,
and only slightly by reason or necessity.

Sometimes Ot loves the subtle insanity of the paths,
sometimes she hates it.  Sometimes, as now, she notices
it no more than she notices the warm still air.

At the baths, Ot slips off her gown of smooth pounded
exudate, and leaves it on a shelf with a dozen others.
Half of the bathing seats within the edges of the pool
are occupied, but Ot sees no one she wishes to speak to.
She lowers herself into the water, pushing her legs slowly
into the thick coolness of it, her muscles immediately
relaxing.  The sweet narcotic smell of the water fills
her head.

She is lying with her arms on the edge of the pool,
her head cradled on them, her body trailing out into
the water, thinking of nothing, when someone speaks.
She arcs her neck, and there is Na putting her own
gown on a shelf and coming toward her, smiling, her
eye tendrils waving a welcome.

Ot watches Na slide into the water beside her.  Where
Ot's belly is the smooth continuous curve of youth,
Na's is marked by the curved crease that says she has
been a mother, has had a child.  Ot thinks of Na going
head-first into the Innerness, being swallowed by
whatever is there, of the child tearing free from her
belly, of the hooded Architor cleaning it and taking it
away.

Ot has never seen a child, but she has read about them
in the books her second mentor gives her.

"I am to have a child," she says to Na.

"I know," the other replies, and bends one of her arms
around Ot's shoulders, stroking the grey skin with her
arcing fingers.  Ot sighs and relaxes, feeling the
firm touch, the bones beneath the skin.  She thinks,
as she often does, that Na might be her parent.  Most
likely it was her first mentor who bore her, but no one
but the Architors know, and Ot likes to think that it
was Na, with her creased belly and her graceful hands.

Once Ot and her first mentor, walking in the large wild
garden in the forward part of the complex, came upon the
dried skeleton of a scavenger, fallen between two swells
of burl.  Her mentor had arranged the bones on the ground
and shown them to her, ten bones for each limb, fifteen
for the spine, ten delicate bones for the neck and ten
for each finger and toe.

People derive their grace and their flexibility, her mentor
said, from the greater number of their bones, and the
agility of the muscles.  Ot know that she has forty
bones in each arm, fifty in each leg, a hundred in her
spine and neck, and that each finger and toe has a
dozen.  She curves and stretches her legs as Na
continues to stroke her back.

"I will raise my child myself," Ot thinks she says, but
Na says nothing, and Ot thinks perhaps she only imagined
saying it.  Na takes her arm away, and Ot turns over, and
they lie together on the edge of the pool, looking at the
stars, thinking of nothing.  The water, secreted by the
labyrinthine glands of the world, soaks into their skin and
softens and cleans it, and the world tastes their scent.

"I wish to see a child born," Ot says to Coth, later.
She is back in her rooms, wearing a gown, clothed as the
people of the complex are clothed, to mark themselves
as different.

Coth shakes her head, the tendrils above her eyes drooping
in quiet regret.  Even before she speaks to reply, Ot has
begun to bring out her pain, twining her fingers together and
steadily beginning to squeeze.

"The birth of a child is a very private matter, only for
the mother, and the tenders, and the Architor."

"Na says that she would let me see, if she had a fourth
child."

"Na says too much to you, as she always does."  Na is a
skilled artisan, expert at the guiding and tending of the
water, and she takes liberties.

"Might I at least ask someone, someone who is soon to bear,
if I might see?"

Coth shakes her head.  "It would not be for the parent, but
for the Architors, to allow that.  And they would not."
Ot is fully in the pain now; it radiates up her arms and
along her neck to the base of her jaw.  "You have the books
that Ib gave you."  Coth has never entirely approved of Ib's,
her second mentor's, choices for her education.

"I wish to see a child born," Ot says, and flexes her fingers
open and twists them closed again, and the pain pulses in her
arms.

"Why do you ask me?" says Coth, and again stands and walks
quickly away.  Ot falls onto a cushion and begins to uncoil.

"I will raise my child myself," she says to Na, and this time
she is certain that she says it aloud.  Na has come to see her,
and they are in the ripest of Ot's food rooms, stroking and
pinching the burls and wetting them with their tears, so that
the skin will soften and give them a meal.

Na looks across at her and frowns.  She says nothing for a
breath, rolling a nubbin of resistant skin between her fingers.
"You are serious?"

"I have not always been serious, I know; I have said nonsense,
I have joked, I have spun stories, but now I am serious.
Completely and entirely serious."

Na purses her lips.  "There is someone you should meet."

There is something odd about En, the person that Na has taken
her to meet.  Sometime during the mutual introductions, Ot
realizes with a start that En is _old_.  People do age, slowly
and subtly, but with enough food and regular baths, age never
shows.  En's skin is wrinkled, almost loose in places, and the
tendrils above her eyes are stiff and seldom move.

En meets Ot's eyes; has she noticed the start of surprise?
She smiles.  "I live too much in my mind," she says, "and
I don't move about enough.  I imagine you're fresh from the
baths, aren't you?  I should go myself."

En's room is small and warm, down in a warren in the tailward
end of the complex, and it is full of books and writings.

"Such a youth," she says.  Ot looks down, but then up again,
meeting the old person's eyes.  "I will raise my child myself,"
Ot says.  This is what Na has brought her here to say.

En frowns and leans back on her sitting burl, crossing her
unsmooth fingers across her stomach and looking speculatively
at Na and Ot.

"So Na tells me. This is not a wise thing to say."

"Na says you are not afraid of the Architors."

En makes a sound with her tongue and shakes her head at Na.
"Those are not the words I would have used, but it is
close enough.  I am not afraid of the Architors, but I have
few illusions about them."

She turns her back for a moment, and then turns back with a
book in her hands.  It is open, and on the thin pages of
drawn exudate there are columns of letters and numbers.

"Do you know what this is?"

"No."

"In this book we record every birth that we get word of.
Here in the complex, for many births now, we have been able
to get word of every one."  She looks up, and Ot nods as
if in appreciation, because she feels it is expected, though
she doesn't know what this means.

"And then we record every youth that the Architors bring
to us.  And we count, and we satisfy ourselves that for
every birth that happens and every child that the Architors
take away, they later bring us a youth."

Ot's eye tendrils spread and billow; it has not occurred to
her that that might not happen, that it needed to be kept
track of.

"And do they?"

"They do," says En, "at least as far as we can tell."

"And what would you do if they did not?"

Beside her Na makes a sound and touches her hand.  En's
lips purse, but she says nothing, only closing the book
and adding it to the stack on the mound before her.

"I will raise my child myself," Ot says again.  She feels
something like ridiculous, something like abashed, to be saying
it again in this room full of books, to this old person who
has few illusions about the Architors.

"That would not be wise," says En.

"En --" begins Na, and Ot feels that she is regretting having
brought her here, having told her that En is someone she must
meet.  But En's face softens, with kindness or resignation,
and she spreads her fingers out in front of her.

"The Architors," she says, "control the Innernesses.  They
know where they are, they know how to open and close them, and
only their tenders know the secrets of them.  Without Innernesses,
there are no children, without children no youths, no new faces
for the complex or the world."

"Why do they want my child?"

En shrugs, and her stiff eye tendrils bend.  "Do you think
we have not tried to ask them this?"  It has never occurred to
Ot to try to ask an Architor anything.  "They do not answer,
of course.  It has taken great spans of time to come to enough
agreement with them that we can track births and youths," En
gestures at the piled books, "unhindered.  I am sorry."  The
last words are directed, Ot thought, more at Na than at her.

Thinking of the great spans of time recorded in the stacks of
books, Ot is reminded of that other book, and of the measuring
and dividing and naming of pieces of time.  She wonders if En
knows of the obscure old practice, if she would appreciate it in
her work.  But another part of her mind is twining her fingers
around each other and thinking of squeezing and pain.

"Sit," Na says, putting her arm around Ot's shoulders and
urging her downward.  "We will talk of other things."  And
they talk, of the complex and the stars and mutual friends,
of the smell of water and the robes of the Architors.  En
has been outside the complex, on the open skin of the neck,
and she tells Ot of towns formed from inexpertly grown burls
of skin, of people who have never worn clothing.

Then Ot feels that she must rest, and she leaves En's close warm
room, going up a ramp to a plaza on the upper level, stretching
out on her back, and staring at the stars.

In one of the books that her second mentor gave her, long ago,
there are drawings of various animals and their bones and organs.
She recalls one picture especially, of the bones and tissues of
a lizard.  Who could kill a lizard, or take one apart finding it
dead?  The lizard in the picture had shockingly few bones, only
two in each limb, a few in the neck and spine, a complex bunch,
but still not many, in the feet.  Ot turns her mind's eye to the
picture of the world, the great lizard floating at rest in the
darkness, and wonders if its movements would be stiff if it
were to move.

"I'm sorry," says Na, as they walk back through the squares
and the halls, "I hadn't thought how -- careful En can
be."  Ot takes her hand, twining their supple fingers
together.

III

So Ot goes into seclusion.  Seclusion is a large mazy
under-room with a low roof and only one door.  The room is
full of burls, soft and hard, flat and oddly shaped, and
hanging vines and creepers that give off a sharp clean
scent.  One corner opens out into a food-room, and there
is even a small pool of water, although it is not deep
enough for Ot to submerge herself in.

She has gone along with the silent hooded Architor into
seclusion, because she has not decided on anything else
to do.  She has thought of running away, but lying in her
rooms staring at the stars, running away seemed impossible,
an overreaction, something that someone would do in a song.

Now in seclusion itself, the big mazy room, she thinks that
running away would be entirely reasonable.  If seclusion
had meant being alone, and unguarded, she thinks that she
would have done it by now.  But the dark-hooded Architor
is almost always by the door, silent, and when she is not,
one of Ot's mentors is.  She is forbidden to speak to them.

She is also forbidden to sing, or to have books.  She is
only to eat, and wash, and rest, until the Architor says
that it is time for her to enter the Innerness.

But how can one rest, in an under-room?  Ot has always
rested under the open sky, on her back on something soft,
looking out into the stars.  Coth has sighed at this
invariable habit, counselling her that it is good to rest
sometimes under a roof, not focusing on infinity, to
keep the spirit concentrated.  She has ignored her
mentor's sighs, as she has ignored so many sighs.

Early in her seclusion, she walked to the Architor at
the door, and looked into the place she guessed the
Architor's eyes were, and she said "I will raise my
child myself.  I will go into the Innerness feet
foremost, only up to my shoulders, and then I will have
a child, and I will keep the child, and raise her into
a youth myself."

She felt a great confusion grow in herself as she said
this; as though she had meant to say it to someone else,
or meant to keep it a secret.  But the Architor had only
turned away, with her back to Ot and her face to the door,
and said nothing.

Now, for a long time, Ot only sits by the shallow pool
of water, sheltered from the eyes of her guards by a
screen of hanging vines and a round rough-surfaced burl.
Sometimes she splashes her feet in the water, sometimes
she takes handfuls of it and wets her face and her arms.
She is forbidden even clothing in seclusion.  She thinks
it is the first time she has been without it for so long.

Sometimes she leans back against the wall beside the pool
and closes her eyes, and her fingers twine together and
squeeze, and the pain comes into her.  Before, she always
used the pain for strength and comfort when talking to
someone who opposed her will.  Now she is talking to no
one, but the silence opposes her will, the room opposes
her will.  Her muscles are tired from the pain.

Now, going from the pool to the food room because she
needs to eat, Ot hears movement near the door.  It is
not one of her mentors coming to relieve the Architor.
It is in fact two Architors, one whose dark hood and
general shape is the one she is used to, and another
that she has never seen before, in a black hood with
abstract sweeps of red on the sides, a squat figure with
short legs and thick arms, who is saying something in
a low voice to the other Architor.

Ot goes on into the food room, and spreads her hands on
the warm skin, looking for the ripest places.  She has
just begun kneading a promising patch when there is a
voice behind her.  It is her Architor, the one in the
plain dark hood.

"I must go.  Your mentor will be here to watch over you
soon.  Do not be afraid.  Do not speak."

And before she can speak, if she would, the Architor is
gone out the door, followed by the small one with the red
winged hood; she thinks that this one looks back at her for
a moment before she goes out, shutting the door behind her.
She hears the stiff sliding of the bolt, and shudders.  Few
doors in the complex have locks or bolts; they are difficult
to make, difficult to maintain, and there is usually no
need for them.  But it seems that here there is.

Ot's fingers twine together of themselves, and she sinks to
the ground from the pain.

But later, going from the pool to a soft place to rest, she
feels a movement in the air, and sees that the door is not
closed.  Probably, she thinks, it is her mentor coming in,
and she almost turns away to avoid seeing her.  But there
is a feeling of emptiness there, not a feeling of presence.

She goes to the door, and it is open a crack, and there is
no one there.  She goes out into the corridor.  There is no
one there.  Heart pounding and her fingers tingling
unbearably, she runs.

The halls and squares and rooms near her seclusion, her
former seclusion, are empty, and she meets no one as she
runs.  By the time she reaches more populated corridors,
she has collected her wits, and slowed down.  She tries to
walk casually, to meet no one's eyes.  And she realizes as
she passes more people that they are also avoiding her eyes,
that their gazes slide off of her.

In the complex, not everyone is clothed.  Those from the
outside, from the Neck, in the complex on errands or under
order from the Architors, are unclothed as she is.  She knows
that when she was of the complex (she does not stop to be
startled by that thought) her eyes similarly slid off of
the unclothed.  She is not proud of that, now.

As she walks naked, and tries to calm her breathing, she
wonders where she will go.  "I will raise my child myself,"
she murmurs to herself, but in the face of her freedom, her
fear of pursuit, her exhiliaration, the thought seems
distant and abstract.  If she leaves the complex, where
will she find an Innerness to give her a child?  But that
thought does not lessen her determination to leave, a
determination that she seems to have had for a long time
now, although she has just noticed it.

Tailward.  If she is to leave the complex, she should walk
tailward, away from the highest places of the head, back
along the sloping hallways that lead toward the Neck, the
exits from the complex.  She has never seen them herself,
but she has heard of them; she dimly remembers leafing
through maps of the complex in one of Ib's books, touching
with her fingers the peak of the Head, the stylized drawings
of archways leading out onto the Neck, the towns and
fortresses out there on the open wild skin.

Then, they were something abstract, like a story or a song
or a dream.  Now she must find them in reality, and pass out
through them to whatever really lies on the other side.

Going tailward, she passes a corridor that leads to En's
room.  She thinks of the old person, surrounded by her books
and her records, not afraid of the Architors, but with no
illusions about them.  Illusions!  Ot knows it would do no
good to seek her out.

And Na.  Something cold pricks at Ot, thinking suddenly of
Na, and realizing that she will be leaving even her behind.
And that she hasn't thought of that until now.  She stumbles,
but catches herself.  She can come back, when she has her
child and the Architors cannot take it, or Na can come out to
her.  She thinks of herself in some sort of house or courtyard
on the open skin, a child (a sort of small youth) by her side,
and Na striding across the skin to visit.

She has seen only one Architor as she walks tailward, glimpsed
through a crowd across a square.  She shivered at the sight,
and tried not to change her speed.  Would the Architors be
looking for her?  Could they, would they do anything if they
found her?  Would they put her back into seclusion, against her
will?  Or do something worse?

No one ever spoke of the power of the Architors.  Ot did not
know if they punished people who defied them, because no one
defied them.  Or no one spoke of it.  Once the Architor had
passed out of sight, the crowd subtly parting before her, Ot
had thought for an instant of how good it would be to be hooded
like an Architor rather than bare like a bather or an outsider.
She could take an Architor's robe, she thought to herself, and
drape it over her, and then the crowds would part for her also.

It is the most frightening thing she has ever thought.

Now she is in a part of the complex that she does not know,
and she has become confused.  Panting slightly, she slips into
an alcove in the gnarled side of an irregular wall.  From
somewhere she smells the sharp narcotic smell of water.  She
closes her eyes and concentrates on the image of the world
in her mind, the lizard floating in the dark, and she
finds the point on that image that is the point where she
is now.  She has moved tailward, halfway to the edge of
the crown, the complex.

Soon she will have to rest.

She would like to rest under the stars, here on the upper level
of the complex, in a roofless room on a soft patch of cool
trained skin; she passes people lying alone, and in twos
and threes, on raised soft places in the center of a plaza,
and she would like to lower herself down among them and let
her mind drift off into the stars like theirs.  But she is
afraid to.

A rough ramp leads down from the star-dimness of the upper level
to the hot brightness of the under-rooms, and reluctantly she
takes it.  Down in the warm pockets of the lower level she feels
more hidden, possibly safer, but also more tired.  Perhaps Coth
was right; perhaps resting down here, with the roof close over
her head, will help her focus.  She wants to focus.

Down a corridor, across a broad room, into a winding nest,
net, of narrow hallways and warm smells.  People's personal
rooms are marked off, where the people have chosen to mark
them off, by hanging sheets of exudate, braided vines, even
a door or two.  But other people leave their rooms open, pass
freely in and out of each other's spaces.  People live closer
together here, tailward.  Ot looks for a covered place to rest.

Coming around a corner, she is facing two hooded Architors
across a narrow room.  She stiffens, tries to relax, speeds
up, tries to slow down, walks past them, manages not to run.
They seem to ignore her entirely, although she keeps herself
from turning to make sure.  She turns a corner, and another,
and another.  Then she looks around, and they are not there.

She cannot recall ever seeing more than two Architors together
at once.  People say that the Architors live in the Innerness,
that they can travel to the stars, that they keep every third
child for themselves (but En would have noticed that, surely).
But mostly people do not talk about them at all, and turn
away when they appear.

She is very, very tired, and although she would like to be
further from the pair of Architors, she has to rest.  She
finds, pleasingly quickly, a dense and quiet room full of
tangled vines and resting nooks, and going to an unoccupied
one in a sheltered corner she lies down and twines her fingers
over her belly, curls her legs under her.

It is odd to be resting under a roof, and at first she cannot
quiet her thoughts.  But she is so tired that they quiet of
themselves, as tired as she is, and now she is staring up
at the gnarled patterns in the skin of the burl that curves
over her, and she thinks that it is nearly as lovely as
the stars.

IV

Here is Ot, long before seclusion, before even the first time
she saw the complex Innerness hot and red in its under-room,
standing in a ring of people in their brightest clothing, and
singing.  Ot's voice is high and sweet.  Their song is a good
one, a new one just written by a person that Ot has never met,
a person named Na.

Ot stands in the circle with her fingers twined around the
fingers of the people to her left and right.  To her right is
Ib, her second mentor, who has just given her the book of
maps and the book of skeletons, and to her left is someone
she doesn't know, a graceful person with an alert and welcoming
smile.  Ot thinks that this person to her left has a voice
she would like to hear singing by itself.

After the song, the group breaks up into knots and filaments,
people go off to rest, or to find food, or to talk in corners.
Ot turns to Ib, and then to the tall singer next to her.

"Introduce me," she says.  And Ib tells Ot that Na is Na,
and tells Na that Ot is Ot.

"That was your song!  It was perfect."

Na smiles and touches Ot's shoulder.  "I'm off to rest," she
says, "I'm glad you liked it.  We should talk later; Ib has
told me about her new youth."

Ot thinks she is also tired, that perhaps she should go with
this Na and rest next to her, but she doesn't.  She goes with
Ib, and bothers her with questions about Na and about songs
until Ib sends her a dozen hallways away with an unimportant
message.

Later, Ot learns that Na rests in upper rooms, under the
stars.  "Is that where you get your songs?" she asks.  Na
only smiles.  In time, Ot learns Na's silences and her smiles,
and that she is not only a writer of songs but a trainer of
skin, an artisan who can make burls and mirrors, and guides
for water.

Ot makes a few songs of her own, but decides that they aren't
very good.  So she rests on her back under the stars, and sings
Na's songs to herself.

Later, Na has a child.  First, she tells Ot that she will be
away for awhile, and Ot should not worry if she doesn't see her.
Then, when she returns, she is quiet and solemn.  Her skin is
taut, Ot thinks, and she does not smile as much.  Na tells Ot
that she is to have a child.

The child grows within Na's body.  Ot asks Ib for books about
children, and with only a small frown she supplies them.  The
books are thin and few, with the same pictures of heavy people
with odd lumps in their bodies, words about the extra food and
warmth that people with child need, and two pictures of chidren,
unsatisfyingly vague.

Na spends more time resting, more time reading, more time in
the close warm under-rooms.  But she still rests in the roofless
square, under the stars, with sheets of fibrous exudate covering
her body.  Sometimes Ot lies beside her, and they look up into
the stars, and they sing, or they talk.

Once Ot takes Na's hand as they rest together, and Na turns
her head and looks at her, and twines their fingers more
tightly together.  Later, Na puts Ot's hand onto her odd
bulging belly.  Something moves in there, under the skin,
and although she should have known it might, that the child
there was alive, she gasps and pulls her hand away.  Na
pats her shoulder and her eyes go back to the stars.

Here is Ot, walking with Na in the wild garden forward, Na
having had her child not long ago, and the Architors having
taken it away.  Na seems less serious now, but almost sad.
She moves stiffly, her body still awkward, and she rests often.

"Don't fret about me," she says, "I'll be better."

They sit on a long rounded burl, and Ot begins to sing a
song, one of Na's songs from when Ot first met her, but
Na raises a hand and stops her.  "Look," she whispers,
"look."

Under the edge of the burl, away from the path, a large
green lizard, as large as Ot's hand with the fingers all
outspread, lies in the grass.  Around it, on four sides,
smaller copies of itself, tender pale green, shelter under
its sides and legs.

"Lizards," Ot says.

"Lizards," says Na.

Quietly Ot tells her about the book that talks about skeletons,
and the few long bones that lizards have, and the many short bones
that people have.  She curls her arm in and out and back
around her head, and Na smiles and does the same, and their
arms do a coiling dance in the air, under the stars.

They watch the lizards until someone runs past on the path.
The lizards are startled and dart away, vanishing into the
burls and vines, the little ones trailing after the big one.

Later Ot and Na rest, as they always rest, on their backs on
a cushioned rise, looking at the stars.  Then they go to Ot's
rooms to eat.  Ot watches her friend moving around the room,
coaxing food from the skin, and wonders at the way she guards
her belly, and the stiff way she walks.

"Could I --," she starts.  And stops.  Na looks up.

"Did they -- the child?"  And she reaches out toward Na, who
looks surprised (Na never looks surprised), and looks down at
herself.  Na smiles, and Ot thinks that her smile is warmer
than it has been, but also tired, wan, attenuated.

"Come," Na says, and draws Ot to her.  She slips her gown over
her head and off.  Ot's eye tendrils splay out wide, and she
draws in her breath.  Around Na's middle is a broad band of
exudate, pulled tight around her, but above and below the band
a red wound shows, an angry slit in the smooth grey skin.

Ot touches the edge of the redness, gently, gingerly.
"It doesn't hurt anymore," says Na, "it's healing."
And Ot sees that in fact it must have been redder,
rawer, deeper, not too long ago.  She puts out three
fingers and strokes the sides of the wound lightly,
unable to look away from Na's skin, opened and reclosed,
bound with the band around her middle.

Now, lying in this close warm resting place, looking at the
burls above her head, on the way from what is familiar to
what is not, from the complex to the Neck, Ot thinks that
the red of Na's child-wound was not quite the same as the
red of the Innerness, and the healing puckering flesh at the
sides of the wound not quite the same as the ridge of world
skin at the edge of the Innerness.  But not very different,
either.

Around Ot where she lies, the life of the complex goes on.
Others rest in the room around her, for it is a room very
suitable for resting, perhaps even designed for resting.
The skin here has been coaxed into comfortable pockets and
niches, and vines allowed to grow artfully from the burls to
provide privacy and quiet.

People pass through the room on the way from here to there;
it is not quite a corridor, but also not a still place that
leads nowhere.  People in the complex move from place to
place, visiting, going from eating place to resting place,
going (Ot thinks) from friends to seclusion, from the bathing
pool to the Innerness, where they will be plunged headfirst
into the hot redness and lost, or made to have children that
the Architors will take away.

She opens and closes her hands, twines the fingers around
each other and squeezes gently, feeling in the back of her
mind the availability of pain, but having no desire to
bring it out.  She moves all of her muscles, and her body
undulates in the resting place.

Later, rested, she slides out of the nook and stands, not
entirely comfortable to be without clothes, not entirely
calm about leaving the Head, looking about her, she hopes
subtly, for signs of Architors or pursuit.

In the hallways and rooms near the tailward edge of the
complex, Ot begins to see soldiers.  She does not realize
what they are at first.  She has read about soldiers in her
books, but they have seemed, like seclusion and running
away once seemed, to be something only in books, or in the
far past, or in distant places.

But here near the Neck side of the complex there are soldiers
in the rooms and the hallways.  Not many, always in small
groups, never in the way, always deferential.  Or rather, Ot
sees, always deferential to those clothed in the clothing of
the complex, as she is not.

The soldiers are clothed themselves, but their clothing is
functional, holding their weapons, their guns and knives,
their bullets.  They move among the people quietly and
slowly, going from one place to another, their eyes always
in motion.  Their eyes, Ot sees with some alarm, do not
slide past and around her as the eyes of the softly
clothed people do, as her eyes would have not long ago.

The soldiers see her.

Why are their soldiers in the complex?  Her books have not
told her much about history, except for isolated stories full
of names and places.  There have been battles for control of
the Head complex, battles for possession of the Neck, battles
for the choicest food fields.  But those, she thinks, were all
far in the psat.

Some of the soldiers, Ot sees, have mother-scars on their
bellies, barely showing under the padded weapon belts and
holsters.  Others do not.  She wonders where the soldiers
come from, and wonders why she does not know.

Here is Ot, with Na, long after Na's first child, and not
long before the seclusion for her second.  Ot has been
telling Na about her books, about the kinds of other stars
that there are, about the ancient method of piecing and
naming time.

"Why don't people know about these things?  Why are not
there more books?  Where is the book that tells me why
people stopped naming time, since this book does not
know?"

Na smiles.  "Always Ot," she says.  "People have other
things to do, songs to sing, food to eat, and the baths to
soak in.  Artisans are training the skin and drawing out
exudate.  Why should any more of it go into books?"

Ot shakes her head, unable to explain.

"Each book is trying to explain the world by itself.
Why do they not build on each other?  If I wrote a book,
it would start from the place all the other books leave
off."

Na only smiles again and shakes her head.  Ot thinks
how lovely she is.  "Come, I've written a new song;
you should sing it with me."

Ot tries to remember the words of that song now, standing
in a corner of a room far tailward in the complex of the
Head, watching people go by, wondering if she should be
avoiding soldiers as well as Architors, wondering if
anyone is looking for her, wondering what Na is doing.

But the words elude her.

V

"Why do you wish to leave the Head?"

Ot has been stopped by a soldier as she approaches the archways
that must lead out of the complex, onto the open skin.  As
simply as that, she has been stopped and taken aside, into a room
with a door, with one soldier standing by it, and another
soldier, in different clothing, sitting behind a broad flat
table of a burl before her.  The soldier does not offer her a seat.

Ot feels her fingers twining, tastes the memory of pain in her
mouth and arms and lips.  Are the soldiers workers of the Architors,
like the tenders of the Innerness?  Ot does not know.  Her
books do not say that they are, and she has never heard anyone
say it.  But they have stopped her, and she is afraid that they
will take her back to seclusion.

"I have never seen the open skin," she says, and then she
thinks that that was the wrong thing to say, that now she
cannot claim to be a guest or a worker or an artisan from
the Neck come into the complex for a time on some business;
but the soldiers must know that already, because they have
stopped her, and they have not, or they have not as far as
she has seen in a long time watching the archways, stopped
anyone else, clothed or bare.

"Why are you unclothed?" the soldier asks, "Has someone
taken your clothing?  Do you need help?"

Ot wonders how the soldier, the soldiers, know that she should
be clothed, that she has worn clothes almost constantly since
she was a youth.  People clothed and bare pass in and out
of the archways, but something about her says "here is a
clothed person walking naked."

She looks down at her belly, at the smooth childless unbroken
skin.

"No.  Only I know that people on the open skin go without
clothes, and I thought I would also."

The soldier considered, and nods, and waves at the low burl
against the wall.  Ot sits, and the soldier goes out, and
in a short time another soldier comes in.  This one is smaller,
lighter armed, with a jagged mother-crease showing above her
belt, and some other sort of scar on the skin of her shoulder.
She sits behind the burl-table, and looks at Ot.

After a moment, another person enters, with two curves vessels
full of clear liquid.  She puts them in front of the small
soldier, and goes out.  The soldier beacons to Ot.

"Come," she says, "drink."

Ot is taken aback.  People get water from bathing.  Drinking
from vessels is a ceremony, a ritual (although, thinking of
it, she supposes that people like En, who bathe rarely, must
get their water somewhere, in private).  Why does the soldier
want them to drink together?

Perhaps customs are different at the archways, or among the
soldiers, or among the people who go unclothed.  How little
she knows, she thinks.  Were there not books about this?

She perches on the edge of the burl and takes the vessel in
her hand.  It is shiny and curved, some worked exudate or
plant composite.  The soldier smiles at her encouragingly,
and she puts the vessel to her lips.  It feels strange and
formal.  She drinks the liquid quickly, and even as she
notices how odd the taste is and opens her mouth to speak,
her legs are going limp and curling under her.  Someone behind
her, perhaps the soldier at the door, catches her under the
arms and lowers her to the ground.

Her eyes close.

---

The world is a great ring of hard earth, surrounding and
surrounded by a roiling sea of white fog.  The fog rises
and falls with the wind, and streamers break off and blow
across the land.  At the inner and outer edges of the ring,
the land slopes down into the fog, vanishing into whiteness.
The fog is not breathable; no one knows what lies at the
bottom of the fog sea within the ring, or on the infinite
trackless bottom of the fog ocean outside it.

Ot awakens in a small dark house on the inner edge of the
ring, not far from the edge of the fog.  She sits up in her
bed and blinks her eyes.  Something has confused her, some
dream (what is a dream?) that came in her sleep (what is
sleep?).  She stands (why are her legs so short and stiff?)
and goes to the window, and looks out at the edge of the
fog.

The fog seems close this morning (what is morning?); it has
risen during the night (she thinks 'what is night?', but
only dimly for an instant; she is fully awake now).  She
sees some of her neighbors standing and looking worriedly
at the edge of the sea, and others walking up the slope to
their fields and factories.  She pulls her nightgown off
over her head and folds it under her pillow, goes to the
dresser and finds clothers, dresses herself (her body
feeling almost entirely familiar now).

She is about to fix herself breakfast when the shouts
come from outside.  She goes to the door, and the wind
in her face when she opens it strikes panic into her.
The fog is billowing and tearing in the wind, but under
the roiling it is moving, rising, rising more quickly
than she has ever seen it rise, and the people who were
only frowning at it not long ago are now running, running
up slope to escape the fog, or running to other houses
to awaken anyone who might still be within.

Ot stands in her doorway (hers?) for a long moment,
frozen by the activity outside.  A dense wisp of fog
curls out of the rising wall and wraps around her
head, and her breath stops in her throat.  The smell,
the taste of the fog is stifling, deadening, a breath
from something that has never known breath, the scent
of a place that has never known life.

She throws herself out of the doorway, out of the patch
of fog, and takes a deep breath in the nearly-clear
air.  People are shouting on both sides of her, rousing
nearby houses or shouting each other's names into the
wind.  "Has anyone raised the Shermans?"  "Are the
Fishers awake?"

And before Ot can take more than two breaths, the
shouting and running people are gone, and the fog has
swept over and past her.  Before it closes down,
she thinks she hears a voice, one final shout, from
downslope, from inside the whiteness.

How long can Ot hold her breath?  She knows that she has
had to test this before, but somehow she does not know
the answer.  She runs downhill, her lungs already beginning
to burn from the anticipation of air.  There are pockets
of healthy air within the fog, pockets of fog within
every pocket of air.  She manages one more gulp of air,
but it has the taint of fog in it, and it slows her down.

All along the inner side of this part of the ring, and all
along the outer side of the opposite arc, the wind, a
fifty-year wind, is ruffling the fog and pushing it up
onto the land, covering houses and fields and factories
and stores.  In the wealthier districts they are spraying
precious water up onto the fog, which weighs it down and
pushes it back.  But where Ot is the people only run.

Ot fumbles with the handle of Na's door -- no, not "Na",
what sort of name is "Na" -- the handle of Anna's door,
wanting to shout but not having the breath for it.
The door opens, the air within is full of fog.  Ot's
lungs are burning in fact now.  She pushes herself into
the room, and there on the ground is Anna, beside the
bed.  Ot crouches beside her, puts an arm under her
shoulders, with her lungs bursting.

Then she sees that what she thought was a tangle
of sheets and pillows in the bed is a child.  Why
is there a child in Anna's bed?  Ot's confusion
returns, the quiet slur of the wind becomes a howling,
air seeps through the walls and the house shakes.
Ot tries to look in every direction at once, to lift
Anna's sleeping body, to uncover the child.

And then the wind shrieks still louder, and the fog is
torn away, and the roof and the walls of the house are
torn away, and Anna is awake and shouting and clinging
to her.  The child sits up and cries out, and they
draw it to them, the wind ripping insanely at their
clothes, debris whipping past them and slamming into
them.  Ot's head is bruised by a flat board, Anna's
face is cut by a flying stick.

The wind lifts them up and flings them away, out over
the wide deadly stretch of whiteness that is the fog
ocean.  Down below them, like a toy or a drawing, the
dark ring that is the world becomes steadily smaller
until it disappears.  Ot looks at Anna, but Anna is
looking at the child, who has buried her face in Ot's
shoulder, and is sobbing.  Then something strikes
Ot again in the head, and her eyes close.

---

Ot awakens again lying on a cusioned burl, in a windless
place.  She holds her hand in front of her face, counts
the eight curling fingers, twists her supple arm into
a circle, holds the grey skin before her eyes.

At the end of the burl sits the soldier.  She is frowning
at Ot in concern.

"Are you well?" the soldier asks.

"Well?"

"We gave you a truth drug.  You reacted strongly."

"Truth?"  Ot is puzzled by truth.  And by drugs.  But
then she remembers, both the drink and before that a
book, a book that mentioned liquids that would relax a
person's mind and tongue.

"What did I tell you?"  Ot sits up, her head spinning.
The soldier puts out a supporting hand.

"Enough," she says.  "We are not creatures of the
Architors.  We will not turn you over to them.  But
there is no point in running away.  You should go back."

Go back into the fog, Ot thinks.  What fog?

"I will raise my child myself," she says.

The soldier shakes her head.  "That is no business of mine.
We will not stop you from going out through the archways if
that is what you want to do.  But the Neck is no place for
someone from forward."

"You will not tell the Architors?"

"The Architors do not speak to us, we do not speak to them."

"Why are there soldiers?"

The soldier's eye tendrils splay apart, and she smiles oddly.
"There are soldiers here so that there can be people like
you forward.  We all hope to be you later, just as those
on the Spine hope to live on the Neck, and those near the
Tail, when they wish anything at all, hope to live on the
Spine.  You should go back forward, since you can."

"I will raise my child myself," Ot says, and rises to her
feet and starts for the door.  The soldier has said that they
will not stop her from going through the archways.

As she passes out the door, the soldier calls after her.
"Be careful," she says, "not everyone is as kind as you are
used to."  Ot ignores her.  The archways are broad and high,
and beyond them is the open skin.

VI

At first she thinks it is just a large strip of wild garden.
People pass here and there, the black sky and the stars
rise over all, and burls and vines grow at random.  But
then she sees that what she thought was a burl near at
hand is a hill in the middle distance, what she thought
was a wall in the middle distance is a vast plain immensely
far off, and she stumbles and falls.  Her legs curl under
her and she rolls softly down the slope from the archways,
and people dodge around her and laugh.

She stops on her back on a warm rough patch of skin, and
someone helps her to her feet.  She wonders if whatever
marked her to the soldiers also marks her to these people,
if she is obvious to all as a clothed person naked.

She thinks suddenly of Architors in their hoods, looking
out from the archways and seeing her standing there.  She
moves off quickly, away from the arches and the Head,
into the tangle of burls and vines and people that stretches
out down the Neck.  Looking back, she sees the outer wall
of the complex rising against the sky, and she thinks that
the picture in the book looked nothing at all like the
reality.

The Neck is familiar and strange.  The same plants grow
here as within the complex, although she thinks they are
thicker and tougher.  The same warm skin is under her
feet, but everywhere she goes is both warm, like an
under-room, and open to the sky, like a room on the upper
level.

She knew, of course, that on the Neck where is only one
level, only the open skin.  But the word "open" has
tricked her.  The Neck around the archways to the
complex is anything but the thing she had pictured,
a flat gently rolling table of various skin with a
few strange bare people walking here and there under
the sky.

The real Neck is a jumble of burls and walls and gardens
and hanging vines and people going purposely through it
as though they know exactly where they are and where they
are going.  Ot has spent her whole youth in the forward
part of the Head complex.  Now here her instincts and her
reflexes lead her wrong as often as they lead her right.

There are tight hallways where she would expect plazas,
upward slopes where she would expect downward ramps
(nowhere for a downward ramp to lead, here), closed
doors where she expects arches, and everywhere there are
walls, walls whose other side she cannot get to, walls
with unknown things behind them.

Walking idly between the walls and through the
unpredictable squares, she is ambushed twice by the
immensity of the world, by a hint of what she thought
"open" meant on the open skin, by a sudden vista from
a swell of skin down along the Neck and out across the
spine.

Both times she stands mesmerized, although she does not
fall again.  It is like looking up a wall that leads into
the sky, like falling into a well.  She thinks how many
people there must be in the world, if all the skin she can
see from here is as mazily occupied as this bit of the Neck.

Pulling her eyes away from the second sudden vista, she is
aware of people looking at her as they pass, their eyes
perhaps narrow, the tendrils waving in amusement or some
kind of curiosity.  She does not want to attract attention.
Some people, she sees, are clothed like people in the complex,
although most have only pouched belts or a shoulder bag.

Perhaps she should find clothing, not to appear like a clothed
person naked and obvious to the Architors; but perhaps she
should stay as she is, not to stand out from the mostly bare
crowds around her.

Now she realizes that she is hungry.

She has not thought about eating in her escape from seclusion;
it has been an escape entirely without plan.  Her mind traces
the way back into the complex, to her food rooms, estimates
which one will be the ripest, urges her feet to turn that way.
But she stays where she is, and thinks.

If she had a friend here on the Neck, she could share her
food.  If she knew where someone kept a food room open, she
could go there.  If she asks someone, one of these passing
busy people, will she attract attention?

She asks.  She catches the eye of a wide and likely looking
person with a blue woven shoulder bag, who sits in the corner
of a plaza stretching her feet.

"A place to eat?" the person says, asking her question back at
her, "Who are you?  You are from the Head; where are your
clothes?"

"How did you know?  Why does everyone know who I am as soon as
their eyes touch me?  What do I do?"

The person smiles broadly, her eye tendrils curling and waving.
"The way you carry yourself, dear, the careful way your feet
touch the ground.  Also you are entirely bare; where is your
belt, your pack, your bag?  How do you carry anything?  Your
body is young and soft, and obviously used to fine covering."
And she stands.

"My name is Tala," she says, "come home with me."

---

Here is Ot out on the wild open skin, tailward and leftward
from the town that crouches around the archways from the Head
to the Neck.  She is out of breath, and very tired, and
beginning to be hungry again.  She is only walking now, not
running, but still she does not want to slow down enough to
search among the tangled vines and convoluted burls for a
place where the skin might be ripe with food.

She wishes that she had eaten better in Tala's rooms, but the
food had been dry and unripe.  When Ot had suggested that
perhaps another room would be more ready, Tala had only
laughed, a laugh that Ot had not found very pleasant, and
urged her to eat what she was given.  Hungry, Ot had.

Then Tala had shown Ot the resting nook in one corner of
a close little room, and suggested that she rest (she was
indeed very tired) while Tala went out to find friends,
friends who would want to meet Ot.  Ot was grateful for the
chance to lie down (although the nook was too hot and
too small, and the skin it offered to her looking up was
mostly smooth and uninteresting).  As Tala went out (her
rooms were cut off from the plaza outside by a door), Ot
heard a small sound, but thought nothing of it.

Lying there, she had found it difficult to rest.  She thought
of Na, and of the long walk from her rooms in the complex,
and again of which of her food rooms would be ripest, and of
how moist and sweet the food would be.  Then she thought of
Architors, and seclusion, and being locked in a room, and
then she remembered the sound of Tala leaving.

She was at the door in a moment, tugging at it.  It would
not open.  Her fingers began to tighten and twine around
each other, but this time she put the pain away.

When Tala returned, Ot was standing behind the door, and
she wrenched it out of the wide person's startled hand,
and pushed past her into the street, and ran, and ran.
Behind her, she heard Tala shout something, or laugh.

She ran as long as she could, and now she has walked
as long as she can.  She has run tailward, and because
the people seemed to be densest along the line toward
the Spine, she has run leftward also.  Now when she
stops and looks at the image of the world in her mind,
she knows that she is on the left side of the neck, where
it merges into the flat wrinkled back.

The wilderness is a strange place, but not as strange as
the town.  From within a dip in the rolling skin, she
can almost imagine herself in the wild garden forward,
walking with Na, looking at the lizards.  She has seen
no lizards in the wild so far, but she has heard stirrings
in the brush, and seen two scavengers and a wild cat
run across her path.

It is, she thinks, too hot to be the wild garden.

Eventually, she is too tired to walk.  She sinks to
the ground beside a steep burl and looks at the sky.
Being among the black and the stars is deeply soothing.
One of the other stars burns suddenly across her vision,
a streak of vivid blue that burns and is gone in a
moment.

She curls her arms and legs and fingers into a tight
bunch and releases them, relaxing all of her muscles.
Two more streaks, of blue and gold, flash across the
sky.  They look amazingly close, she thinks, for the
other stars.  Her body molds itself into the hot
skin beneath her, in complete comfort.

Then she hears the footsteps.

Without moving, her body goes from relaxation to
utter tension.  Her mind is torn out of the sky and
back down to the earth, to the vines in front of her,
to whatever is walking on the other side of the burl
she lies against.  It sounded to her like a person,
a person walking carefully through the vines.  But
might there be other things out here that walk the
same way?

The footsteps move on, become quieter and more distant,
fade entirely.  She considers staying where she is,
but decides the spot is too exposed.  Does she fear
the Architors, or some unknown sinister friends of
Tala?  (Tala, who may she thinks have been entirely
innocent, and locked her in from some benign motive
that she cannot imagine.)  But in any case too
exposed.

Exhausted as she is, she pulls herself up and, trying
to move quietly over the viny uneven skin, looks for a
more sheltered, a more hidden, place to rest.  The
place finds her, as she loses her footing on a pad
of vine leaves and slides down into a tight niche
between two jagged plates of skin.  It is hot here,
and the skin is hard, but she lands on her back with
her face to the sky, invisible to anyone or anything
that might walk past above, and she decides that it
is not really all that uncomfortable.

She has a long rest down in the niche, looking up at
the sky and watching the lizard floating in the darkness
in her mind.  Later she notices her hunger again, and
is preparing to get to her feet when she sees that
the skin just above where her head rests is ripe
with food.

She sighs gratefully and wets the hot membrane with
her tears and kneads it with her fingers until it comes
away and she can eat it.  The flavor is, she thinks,
wild and sweet.

No longer hungry, she begins to stand, but then falls
back into the litter of leaves at the bottom of her
niche.  Where would she go, if she were to stand up?
Which way would she walk, if she were to walk?

"I shall enter the Innerness feet first, and I shall
enter only up to my shoulders.  Then I shall emerge,
and have a child, and I shall keep the child myself to
raise into a youth."

She remembers someone saying that so confidently, a
long time ago.  Was it really her?  Was it her in
seclusion, going through the archways, smothering in
the fog?  (What fog?)  Her mind entirely unsettled,
her body relaxes back against the hot ground, and
she looks up at the stars.

Is there water out here in the wild, she wonders?  How
common is food?  The patch she has just feasted on is
small; it will give her one more meal, or perhaps two,
but it will have to rest and ripen for a long time after
that.  Will she find a mirror out here, grown naturally
in the various untrained skin?  She smiles at the thought.

Are there Innernesses out here?  The thought startles her.
She has heard of wild Innernesses, but only those that
are tended and healed by Architors.  She thinks of her own
hidden Innerness, in a secret niche on the open skin, with
a pool of water nearby, and patches of food, and a soft
place to rest and to sing.

She will, she thinks, bring Na out here to live with her.
With her and the child.  They can write songs, and sing
them, and tell each other stories, and if they are lonely
they can walk to the town by hidden paths that only they
know, and talk to the people there.

She decides that Tala was probably innocent after all,
a friend, and locked the door because town people always
lock doors, or because she was not thinking that it might
frighten a guest.  But she is not sorry that she ran;
the wilderness has been a welcoming if exhausting place.
She does not think of the footsteps.

VII

She has stood for the third time and climbed to the
top of her niche, intending to go in search of water,
of more food, of her private Innerness, when these things
happen.  A bright and terrible light comes down out of
the sky somewhere ahead of her and disappears behind a
swell of skin; the light is brighter than anything she
has seen before, and her eyes are clamped closed and
flowing with tears.  Just before that, or just after
that, there is a great noise, a roaring or tearing or
gnashing, that fills the world and numbs her ears.

And while her eyes and her ears are blinded and numbed
by brighter and louder things than have ever happened
before, something smaller and quieter, but infinitely
more shocking, happens inside her.  Back in the back
of her mind, where the image of the world floats, the
great lizard moves.  The lids over its eyes crease and
tighten, the mouth with its great teeth opens slightly
wider, the vast feet splay wider and, most appallingly,
the great mottled back arches, just perceptibly, into
the shallowest of U's.

And that smallest of bends throws Ot into the air.

In the air, her eyes still shut and her ears ringing,
her body, abandoned by her mind, curls itself into a
ball.  That ball falls back to the surface, bounces
once, and tumbles down into the niche again.  Another
blast of light, further off, fills the world, and
another sound, and another, more distant.

The sounds die.  The light is still too bright, light
everywhere, but no longer unbearable.  In her mind,
the great lizard has moved its arms and legs and
arched its back in four tiny but world-sized winces,
and now it settles back to relaxation.  Its face
settles out of the momentary grimace, the eyelids
smoothing and the mouth returning to almost closure.

The ball on the floor of the niche unrolls, and
is Ot again.

She is amazed and horrified.  The lizard has moved.
The world has shown itself to have more light and
more sound and more motion than she could have
imagined.  Is this what the world is like, outside
the Head?  But the lizard has never moved before;
she would have seen it, there inside her mind.

She opens her eyes and sits up on the floor of the
niche.  The light is still bright, but dimming fast,
and no longer hurts her eyes.  There is no sound at
all, and she realizes that her ears are still numb,
still stunned by the blow of the sound.

How many people have been hurt, or damaged, by the
the arch of the lizard's back?  Ot does not know how
people live on the open skin.  Will they have been
tossed too high in the air, or crushed in their rooms
or resting places?  Could people have died, have
ceased to be?  Ot knows herself of no one who has
died, but it is mentioned in her books.  People
can die of poison, or murder, or even from the
claws of a maddened scavenger.  But not, she hopes,
of the arching of the world's spine.

(Do people live on the feet, on the eyelids?  She
suddenly finds it strange that she does not know.)

In the image of her mind, of the quiet lizard
floating motionless in the starry dark, she sees
that she is still on the left side of the neck,
at the edge of the back.  She pulls herself up out
of the niche.  (Has the shape of the edge changed?
Her arms and legs are sore, and there is a sharp
painful place on her back.)

The sky is dark, but the skin ahead of her is bathed
in light.  She walks forward (thinking that she should
be running backward, back to the town and the archways
and even back to seclusion), and the light grows.

She walks between twisted burls and over wide
wrinkles in the skin (are there more than there
were before the light, before the sound?), the
light swelling all the time.  She pulls herself
up over a last hot rough cliff (there is an odd
scent in the air), and there in the skin before
her lies the red moist heat of an Innerness.

She walks to the edge slowly.  Here there is no
platform, no carefully-tended edge anointed with
secret oils.  The edge of this Innerness, of her
Innerness, is raw and torn.  What could it have
been, she wonders, falling from the sky so bright
and so terrible?

She curls her legs under her (the skin is very hot,
here at the edge, and the smell is strong) and sits,
looking down the the tight hot redness.

And then something rises out of it, tall and
hot and dripping red, and takes a step toward
her.  And she screams.

VIII

Nartabee has been following the tall granch for a long
time.  She's been following her because she thinks there
might be something in it.  Nartabee's good at telling
when there might be something somewhere.  It's what's
kept her alive and in food for, well, for as long as it
has.

The tall granch isn't careful, and doesn't look especially
strong or otherwise obviously dangerous, but Nartabee sees
that people are leaving her alone.  She walks with a
long stride, and her eyes seem to be looking through
things.  She looked through Nartabee once, and it didn't
feel good.

Nartabee knows that the granch is a granch, because that's
what Nartabee does.  She knows what things are, she knows
when there might be something to it.  She's got the sickness,
has had it since she was a youth, like most people back here
near the tail have the sickness, but it hasn't messed her
up much.  It's made her small, and not very strong, but
she has exactly two eyes, and she doesn't get the screaming
fits, or spend so long staring at a vine-leaf that someone
has to remind her to eat, or any of those things.

Not like some.

So Nartabee knows that the granch is a granch, is someone from
forward come back here to the tail for some reason of their
own, the same way she knows anything else; inside her head and
without really thinking about it.  She knows the granch is a
granch the same way she knows where she is on the image of the
lizard in the back of her mind.

Nartabee wonders if the granch is armed.  She's not obviously
carrying a club or a knife or any kind of gun, but she's
walking with the kind of confidence that comes from being
ready to defend yourself.  Maybe, Nartabee thinks, she's
connected in some way Nartabee doesn't know about, or maybe
she's just too fresh to know that she should be worried.

The granch has reached the edge of town, and Nartabee is
wondering whether or not to keep following her.  Nartabee is
good at following, but it gets harder out on the open skin,
and except for the vague feeling that there's something in it,
she doesn't see any strong reason to keep on.

But she does, for a little bit, and then the granch speeds up
and goes around the corner of a tall vine-bush, and like an
idiot Nartabee slides around after her, and of course there
she is waiting right around the corner, and the tall granch
grabs the short Nartabee with a very strong grip, and pulls
her up off of her feet so they're face to face.

And the granch grins.

Nartabee grimaces back, trying to look friendly, wondering
more urgently this time if the granch is armed, and if the
granch minds being followed.

"H-Hello," Nartabee says to the granch, into that unnerving
grin, "I'm Nartabee.  What's your name?"

"Torcel Vellome," says the granch, still holding Nartabee
off of her feet. Definitely a granch name, "Where do you get
some food around here?"

That is, of course, the main concern of everyone around the
tail; how do you get some food around here, and how do you get
strong enough and connected enough to move forward, toward the
spine, and stop being around here at all?

Now Nartabee grins.  "It happens," she says to the granch, to
her new friend Torcel Vellome, "that I know where a tall smart
person like you and a quick smart person like me can get a nice
meal or six, if we work together."  And as she says it Nartabee
realizes that it's actually true, and that that is probably why
she's been following the granch, and that's probably what was
in it.

Because the granch isn't just a little tall, she is in fact
the tallest person Nartabee has ever seen.  Maybe she's not
from so far forward to be entirely outside the sickness, and
maybe that's what's stretched her out.  Maybe her forward
friends didn't like it, and chased her back here because of
it, even.  But Nartabee has a use for someone tall.

Later, quite alot later, Nartabee and the granch Vellome are
out in the wild skin around the right side of the tail,
with a sack full of food, and a few bruises, and a newfound
friendship.  Or at least Nartabee thinks it's a friendship.
Torcel Vellome, it turns out, doesn't talk much.

"That was a close thing, eh, when the big gleezer with the
knife came around that corner?"  Nartabee likes to talk, and
there aren't many people who will listen to her.  She only
wishes the granch would talk back.  But now she does.

"Don't move," Torcel says, her eye tendrils splayed out and
quivering.  Nartabee opens her mouth to say something, but
before she gets a word out, the granch has hurled herself
forward, knocking Nartabee down and vaulting over her
head, and at the same time there is a tremendous scream,
and what sounds like body striking body with considerable
force.

Nartabee, on instinct, runs a considerable distance, her
legs curved and body low to the ground, before she turns
to see what is going on.  She sees only the last instant;
a bulky misshapen something vanishing among the burls with
a great crashing and snarling, and the granch, Torcel
Vellome, slumping to the ground.

Cursing, Nartabee goes to the granch and crouches down
beside her.  She is alive, awake, her eyes open but her
face contorted and her legs bent oddly up around her body.
She sees Nartabee and her face smooths gradually out, and
her legs uncoil.  There is a deep scratch, a gouge, in her
lower chest.  The flesh is red and torn, and seeping clear
pungent fluid.

"This hurts," says the granch.  Nartabee curses again, and
rifles in her pouch to find something to staunch the wound.

"What hideous canchmer was that?" she asks the granch,
winding what she hopes is a clean strip of exudate around
the other's torso.

"I don't know.  Someone the sickness was not kind to."
Torcel winces as Nartabee ties up the crude dressing.
"This may not do."

Nartabee shakes her head.  "It will do only far enough.
You need more than this.  I know some people."  And,
Nartabee thinks, you probably kept me alive.

IX

So here are Nartabee Silgilesh, the small slick one from
the town near the tail, and Torcel Vellome, the granch from
somewhere forward, sitting in a close warm room in a tiny
house, or large covered niche, out in the open skin somewhere
tailward.  Torcel's wound has been more neatly bound with
medicinal exudate, and the two have shared their bag of
food with the three others in the room.  Tired, they
lean back to rest, bits of the black sky and the bright
stars visible through holes in the fabric above them.

Vellome looks at the image of the world at the back of
her mind, and locates herself.  Am I any closer, she
wonders, to where I am going?

The other three in the room are these: Curatan Silgilesh,
who was a youth along with Nartabee and who the sickness
has touched only in making her skin mottled and pitted
and ugly; Taraban Eluctog, whose feet are too large and
who has visions of impossible creatures and agonizing
cities that overlay the real world and sometimes render
her all but blind; and Torgano Fonato, who was once a
granch herself, and lived for a long time in the rich
and easy towns of the spine, until she did something
that she doesn't speak of, and her people chased her
tailward.

Torgano has lived here so long that she is fully a
tailward person now, and added the syllables to the
ends of her names to make it official.  She tells
stories; it may be that the sickness has gotten into
her, and that the stories she tells are sometimes
from the sickness and not from herself.

They have eaten half the food that was in the bag that
Nartabee and Vellome brought back, through the mazes of
vine and burl that Nartabee brought them through, Vellome's
wound still oozing and Nartabee straining to support her
staggering walk.  Now the wound is closing under the
medicated wrap, and Torgano is telling a story about her
youth, working in a medicine plant on the spine, and
sometimes the story veers off into something else, something
perhaps from the sickness, but Nartabee is content with
either kind of story, and Torcel Vellome is equally
discontent with everything.

The medicine plant where Torgano, then Torgan, worked
was a large airy room high on the spine, elegantly
made from exudate draped around trained burls, with
windows looking out down the slope of the side, and
smaller rooms set into the walls for the secret doings
of the artisans.

Torgan was not an artisan, not then or later, but just one
of the workers on the floor, pulling and working the
skin, pounding the exudate with the pounding machines,
applying the liquids supplied by the artisans, the bearers
of the secrets, from their small enclosed rooms.

Once, Torgano says, talking in a long stream of words
in the close room (Nartabee is used to Torgan talking,
and knows that there's nothing in it, but it's familiar,
like the objects in the house, in the room are familiar),
there was a disaster in the plant.

The workers had misinterpred the instructions of the artisans,
and the artisans had been too busy with a new formulation or
secret or discovery to come out onto the floor and check their
work.  So at that time, one part of the broad flat skin of the
floor had become very thin due to overuse, overtreatment with
the training and exudation ungents, overextraction of the
cloyingly sweet food that the artisans sold to the towns.

Beside this thin section of the floor (the skin taut and
pale, moving in odd ways with the vibration of the pounders
and stretchers) was a machine, an awkward thing of hard
compressed exudate and strange hard white rods (made, some
of the workers said, from the bones of scavengers, or even
the bones of lizards).  The machine was used to press
certain especially-pungent oils into strips of exudate
that were then spread onto the skin and left until the
artisans said to remove them, to change the tenor of the
skin in subtle ways.

The machine was a noisy and an unreliable thing, and at
intervals pieces of it would break off and spin across
the floor or into the air, and workers would curse and
dodge, and the artisans would come out and cluck over
the machine, and take it off into their closed little
rooms to be repaired.

At this particular time, spinning and whining next to the
patch of too-thin skin, the machine was making especially
tense and shaky sounds, and the two workers operating it
(one working the foot-pedals that made it spin, the other
working the handle and feeding in the skin to be treated
in the wizzing and whining maw) were complaining of the
vibration against their feet and hands.

This time it was not a small piece tearing off the wheel
and spinning into the air.  This time the machine, after
a sudden increase in noise and vibration, seemed to split
entirely in half, sending a cloud of small pieces into the
air, the bulk of the housing falling into the leg of the
unfortunate pedal operator (a very long time in her mentor's
house with medicinal exudate around her lower body, on
her back staring at the stars through the hole in the
roof), and the remains of the spinning wheel sliding
sideways, past the hands of the other operator, and
out onto the floor, into the center of that pale thin
dangerous patch of skin.

Which tore from end to end.

"An Innerness," says Torgan, now Torgano, "an Innerness
all red raw ripe smooth wet angry hot opened in the
very floor the skin wide broad flat floor under our
vibrating tired grey loud frightened feet."

The artisans had come running from their rooms, pulled
away from their potions and their secrets, by the sound
of the exfoliating machine and the shouts of the workers.

"I stood and shouted with them all out my soft horrified
and cylindrical throat, and the air walls sky machine
were ringing all with our shouts screams blows songs
terrors flying all which way, and the splitting of the
skin would go all across the floor and open and devour
us and the world would split open and all everything
everyone every person every house fall in and be lost in
the red hot slippery terrible crease."

But the tear that was the Innerness had not spread all
across the world, or even all across the floor, only
across the thin piece of floor, and stopping at the edge,
narrowing to nothing at a raw hot lip.

The artisans had pushed the workers out of the factory,
out onto the square surrounding it under the deep black
sky, and half a dozen Architors had come.

"Six?" Torcel Vellome has raised herself on one arm when the
thinning of the skin entered the story, and at the
appearance of the Innerness has become all attention, her
eye tendrils stiff and splayed and quivering.  "Six
Architors came, all at once?"

"Yes, six in their hoods, one two three four five six,
and they went past us sweeping like other stars brightly
into the factory and onto the floor, and --"

"Did anyone go to fetch them, or did they just come?"

But Torgan, now Torgano, doesn't know that, and Nartabee
raises a grey supple finger before her eyes to quiet the
questions, because we don't talk, here in the niche, when
Torgano is in mid-story, because Torgano is who she is and
we are who we are.  And Vellome settles back, still quivering,
and is quiet.  But listening.

The Architors came, Torgano says, and swept into the factory,
and the factory was closed for a long time, and even after
it opened again there was a sheet of exudate over the place
in the floor where the Innerness had been, and now and then
they would all be herded back out into the square, the workers
and the artisans alike, while a tender went in and did things
that even the artisans were not allowed to see.

The smell of the factory, Torgano says, changed in that
moment, and never changed back, however much the winds along
the spine blew through the windows and through the room.

Torcel is biting her lips and twining her fingers and toes
together at the side of the niche.  Nartabee smiles at her,
glad somehow to see her friend and savior not quite so much
in control.  After Torgano finishes her story, Torcel bites
her lips even harder, waiting a decent interval for others
to speak.

"Torgan," Torcel says finally, "Ah, Torgano," and the
smooth eyes turn toward her, "when the Architors came
to the factory, after the Innerness was opened, do you
remember if anyone went to fetch them, or if they just
came?"

"Just came?" says Torgano, but it may be either a question
or an answer.

"No one'd need to tell Architors about an Innerness," says
the ugly Curatan Silgilesh, "they just know.  They can
smell them, or feel them through the skin of the lizard."

"Heh," mutters Taraban Eluctog of the broad feet and
glowing visions, "all but one, eh?  All but one," and
she chuckles disturbingly, and her eyes move across the
room, following something that is not there.

The room is silent.  Torcel is standing now, looking from
one to the other, and everyone else is looking aside, not
meeting her eyes, or anyone else's eyes; only Taraban sits
unaware, chuckling and watching what only she can see.

"All but one?" asks Torcel, in a whisper, a strong and
diffuse whisper that fills the space.

Silence again.

"We don't talk about that," says Curatan.  Nartabee nods,
uncertain.

"I would very much like to talk about that."  The granch's
voice is quiet.  Nartabee wonders if it is a dangerous
voice; after all, she doesn't really know this granch
except for one shared job (mission, adventure, piece of
work, operation) and that one time when the granch had
saved her life, but that might have been an instinct,
a reflex.  Still, she had done it.

"She saved my life," Nartabee says.  The others look around
among each other, and they nod.

"There is one Innerness," Curatan Silgilesh says, shifting
around on her burl and arranging the sheets of soft pounded
exudate around her legs and feet, "one Innerness that the
Architors have never found.  We don't know why."  She looks
up, and Nartabee and at the granch Vortel who saved
Nartabee's life, like she's wondering if she's talked
about it enough yet.  But she hasn't.

"Torcel Vellome, if you would go outside this room for a
time?"  Nartabee reflects that Curatan Silgilesh talks like
a granch sometimes.  Maybe that's just the way people talk
when they're in charge of things, when they've got something
large going for a long time; when people look up at them.

So Torcel Vellome the granch, tall and long with her eye
tendrils waving, walks outside the room, back and forth
along the small and hidden vine-shrouded path that runs
to and past and away from it, her hands and arms coiling
behind her back, over her head.  She looks at the place
where the room opens to the path, at the black sky, at
the scattered vine leaves.

And later Nartabee puts her head out and says that Torcel
can come back in.

X

To get to the Innerness, they make their way, the three of
them, through a viny wilderness (the food too far apart to
be worth anyone's time to raise a gang and control, too
slow ripening to be worth the trouble to defend, no one
here but starving wanderers and the very sick, and they
see none of them), and then across an even more hostile
place, a place where the skin is rough and channelled and
treacherous, and not even the hardiest vines grow.

"It smells odd," says Torcel, her tongue loosened with
excitement, with finally perhaps being close to the thing,
to something like the thing, that she has been looking for
for a very long time, that she has borne exile for, that she
remembers every time she looks at the sky.

The other two, Nartabee Silgilesh and Curatan Silgilesh,
say nothing, walking carefully across the unfaithful
ground.  Torcel, usually behind because the ground is
unfamiliar to her, not only this particular ground but
all the ground tailward, observes them when she has a chance
to raise her feet from the skin.

Curatan, she is deciding, is interesting in her ugliness;
not beautiful (Torcel does not think that extreme ugliness
merges into beauty, an idea she heard once in a song brought
backward from the Head by some granch in her youth, a song
about merging circles of life and death, beauty and ugliness,
head and tail; a typical Headward song, and entirely
unconvincing), but still interesting, not hard to look at.

They have warned her that going to the Innerness means going
still farther tailward, into air that may be more tainted
with the sickness.  This is, they tell her, one of the reasons
that they seldom go there.  It is also, of course, to keep it
from the Architors, and from everyone else, so no gang takes
hold of it (no gang but them), and milks from it whatever these
four have failed to milk from it, and keeps them from getting
to it.

What do you do with a private Innerness?  Ot, far forward,
dreamed of having her own, near a pool of water and a rich
patch of food, to make a child with and raise it with Na
in peace and songs.

"No, this Innerness has never made a child," Curatan says,
"probably wild ones can't."

But wild ones can, Torcel knows, with a knowing that she
can't share because she can't explain, but no Innerness can
make a child without knowing what only the Architors know.
Which is another one of their secrets.

"We've let a couple of people, people we liked --"

"-- and who could pay us --"

"-- come to the Innerness to try --"

Torcel's eye tendrils flex.

"You let them go into a wild Innerness?"

"Phhh, yes, but we're not idiots, you know, not worms or
bits of leaf, we tied them up with hotropes that could take
the heat and not burn --"

"-- or melt or char or break --"

"-- and we pulled them out fast --"

"-- like the Architors do --"

"-- or as fast as the ones of us who have had children remember
the Architors pulling us out then, from the legal Innernesses,
the allowed the permitted Innernesses in the Innerness houses
out between the town."

"But they never have children."

Now they are at the far edge of the sharp rough stretch of
skin, and Torcel's legs are aching from the pace and the
difficulty of staying upright and not having a leg caught
in one of the ruts (ruts that lead into bright heat, but
only the bright heat of scratchy mottled world-skin, not
the bright red moist hot of the Innerness).  Her eye tendrils
alternately droop with fatigue and prick with eagerness.

"Just ahead here."

The sharp rough skin ends at a wall of viny burls that rear
up like the spine itself.  In the image in the back of her mind,
Torcel the granch sees the lizard floating in the dark, and
sees that she is back around down further tailward now, and
she wonders if the odd smell in the air is the sickness, but
she puts the thought from her mind.  She tries to look closely
enough at the world in her mind to see this ridge of skin burl
and tangled vine that they are approaching, but all she sees,
as always, as all anyone else ever sees, is the various uneven
skin of the lizard.

Curatan pauses for a moment, considering, then takes them off
to the left.  There, where no one could see it who wasn't
looking, and in any case no one would ever come here who
wasn't looking, as the skin under the vines ahead seems just
as unripening and unpromising of food, if perhaps easier on
the feet, than the desert they have just crossed, there is
a place where the vines hang across an opening, and the
opening may be passed through.

The three of them pass through.

And there, unmarked and unguarded by anything more than the
desolation, the screen of vines, and two twists in the path
between the burls, is an Innerness.  Torcel feels it in her
skin and sees its light before they turn the twist and come
upon it.  Her eye tendrils quiver with emotion.

It is a small Innerness, and irregular in shape.  It seems to
have been formed by some error in the growth of the burls
around it, perhaps incompletely healing an old wound (what
could wound the lizard, out in the dark between the stars
and the other stars?); one burl arches up over it, and another
grows roughly around the rim, which is wide enough for a
person to pass in, but not much more.

On the lip of the Innerness are some coils of rope and
various bits of plant and human litter.  The wind does not
reach here.

"Our Innerness," Nartabee says, quietly and unnecessarily;
this place has always made her uncomfortable; even back near
the tail, Innernesses and children are not lightly spoken of.

Torcel curls her legs and lets herself down at the edge,
staring down into the slick hot moist red surface, that
flows and heaves slowly and langorously, and scorches her
face with its light.

She turns back to the others, and opens her mouth.

"My friends," she says, "I --".

But then she turns back to the Innerness, and shakes her
head.

And plunges in, head foremost, before they can even think
of restraining her.

And she is gone.

Nartabee Silgilesh and Curatan Silgilesh rush to the edge of
the Innerness, shouting, heedless of who might hear and come
and find their secret, not thinking of anything except that
this person, this person they did not know well, but who is
still a person and one they have chosen to trust, has just
thrown herself into the heat and mystery and danger of the
world, without a rope or an Architor, into an Innerness that
probably has no bottom, and has vanished.

They look at each other for a moment in silence.  Neither
suggests, although both consider and reject, the idea that
one of them could tie a rope to the other, and that one could
go down into the Innerness and see if by some chance the granch
might be saved.

"If she wanted to destroy herself," Curatan finally observed,
her flailing eye tendrils belying the calm irony of her tone,
"she could have found much simpler ways."


XI

The heat of the Innerness scorches Torcel Vellome terribly
in the first moments of her plunge.  This is the part she
has tried not to think of, the part of the memory she has
tried to supress, because it could weaken her resolve, could
weaken anyone's resolve.

The Innerness is trying to enter her, burning her lips in
trying to enter her mouth, burning her eyes in trying to
enter her eyes.  She has not bathed in many days, and the
places on her skin where dirt and her own exudations have
built up burn more terribly than the rest.  The place on
her chest where the wound is, just beginning to heal, is
the worst of all, a pain beyond description.

Her body tells her to clamp closed her eyes and mouth and
nose, but she opens them all wide, both because that was
her plan, and because she is screaming from the pain.

The redness and the heat scald their way into her, and she
cannot breathe.  The memory is false, she knows suddenly, and
all that she has done is destroy herself, make an end to herself
in hot red searing pain.  She tries to scream again, and when
her body desparately gasps for breath the Innerness enters
her fully, suffusing her, and in a final spasm she is over
the edge.

And then the pleasure comes.  The heat is still heat, as
hot and searing as before, and for all of that the pain is
still pain, but it is a joyous and proper pain that feels
better than anything else in her life.  She wriggles her
legs and shoots forward into the hot red light of the
inner fluid of the lizard, and it is better than the memory
said it would be (although before she plunged in she
would have said that that was not possible).

She puts her arms above her head and clasps her fingers
together, and wraps her legs around each other and undulates
her long slim body, flying effortlessly through the thick
hot medium of red.  This is, she knows, the thing that her
body was designed for.  Walking around on the surface of
the lizard's skin, feet separate and hands full of things,
eyes full of dark, muscles aching, that is an accident,
a mistake, a silly error.

This is rightness.

In the image in her mind, the lizard seems more alive,
more vibrant, although it is entirely unchanged.  She
looks at the lizard and she looks at the hot redness,
brighter here and dimmer there, thicker here and thinner
there, feeling the currents flowing around her as she
pushes gracefully forward, as the lizard floats in space.

She is moving so quickly through the Innerness that she
can see the movement in the image in her mind.  She is
speeding headward and spineward, into the great central
currents of the world.

Something whips past her right shoulder, frighteningly
close and fast.  She slows down, eases her joyous rush into
a supple glide, and looks around.  The red that engulfs
her and fills her (every nerve in her body is screaming
signals of heat, but those signals are now comforting
and correct) is not uniform.  There are patterns and
patches, darker places and lighter places, objects
embedded in the flow, some moving and some not.

Will she be able to get back to the Innerness that her
friends (such good friends, such true and perfect friends)
led her to?  She should go back at once, and reassure them
that she is fine, that they should come in and join her,
that this is what people were made for.

With a flick of her entwined legs she flips herself around,
out of the spineward flow and back toward the tail.  She
watches the image in her mind, finds the direction, and
soon finds the place, or near the place, where the Innerness
should be.  But there is nothing, no trace of a break in
the flow or an opening to the air.

Torcel frowns, although this is a minor annoyance, and the
joy that still pulses through her is entirely undisturbed.

The Architors, she thinks, know about Innernesses because
they feel them from within (she hopes there are none
nearby).  If this Innerness has been unfound by the
Architors in their hoods for this long time, it must be
because it cannot be felt from within.

She is just giving up on the notion of returning to
speak to her friends, and going off to immerse herself
in joy forever, when a strange dark thing appears before
her.  She puts out a hand to touch it, and knowing from the
terrible cold of it that it is a thing from the surface,
she grasps it and pulls herself along.

She does it quickly, knowing that if she lets herself
think of going back into the cold upper world, she may
not be able to do it.

XII

It was Nartabee who suggested tying something heavy to the
end of their rope and lowering it into the Innerness, just
in case the granch was down there and still in reach, but
somehow trapped.  Curatan approved the notion, more because
she knew it would help her rest better than out of any hope
of actually benefitting the granch, who was no doubt seared
to painful nothingness by now.

When something grabbed the rope and began pulling, Nartabee
nearly let it go, so great was her surprise and so instant
her fear.  It was (oddly, as they both thought afterwards)
Curatan who reached out and grabbed the line as it began to
slip into the Innerness, and held it until Torcel, hot and
terrible and dripping with red, sprang out of the Innerness
to stand on the lip, searing liquid spewing from every
orifice to slip thickly back down, gasping and moaning from
the sudden cold and the end of pleasure.

The granch began breathing air again with a horrible choking
cough, and shook herself free of the last big drops of
Innerness.  (Many of these splattered onto the two
Silgileshes, and while they were searingly hot they
caused oddly little pain, and no damage.  This is a
thing that the two have noticed before, in the fruitless
dunkings they have carried out in this room.)

Now the three of them, the Silgileshes and Torcel Vellome
the granch, who has just thrown herself into an Innerness
and emerged again, stand in the narrow room, the cleft
in the burls on the skin of the world, and look at each
other.  The silence is full.

"Is there a bottom, then, to our Innerness?" asks Curatan
Silgilesh, again sounding calmer than she is, though there
is some fear and some anger in her voice.

Torcel shakes her head and sighs, her eye tendrils flurring
with the inability to speak.

"Oh, my friends," she says, "you must come in with me."

The two step away from her, or would if there were space
in the place they are standing.  No one has ever gone into
an Innerness in company, nor for any reason but the will or
the duty to have a child.  The pain is not something anyone
would go into lightly.

"And why would we want to do that?" asks Nartabee, feeling
that this granch is entirely a stranger after all; probably
she saved Nartabee's life for some insane reason of her own.

And then the face of the lizard grimaces with pain, and
the legs of the lizard splay, and the spine of the lizard
arches, and the three of them are tossed about the close
place where they stand like stones in a bag, curled into
tight grey balls.

The three land as the lizard's arching ends, and roll,
and uncoil.  The ball that was Nartabee has skimmed the
top surface of the Innerness and bounced off, and her
left arm is scorched and dripping with thick red drops.
Nartabee turns as soon as she can get to her feet, and
disappears through the rustling curtain of vines.  Curatan,
the other Silgilesh, stands for an instant, mind spinning,
and then darts after her, for no reason beyond wanting
to be in motion, in the open.

Torcel Vellome, on the other hand, dives headfirst back
into the welcoming redness, and writhes, and screams, and
lets the searing heat enter her again, and is full.

Within the redness, things are the same, but different.
The crash and the arch and the disaster that has come
suddenly to the surface world and as suddenly died away
has been slower in coming down here, but also slower in
going away again.  There are waves in the thick searing
red, waves of compression and release, waves of light and
dark, eddies and curls and coils of the slow roiling stuff
that is the Innerness.

Torcel again winds her legs together and her fingers over
her head, and knifes and wriggles through the world at
speed.  In her mind she is flowing forward on the image
of the world, toward the spine and the Head, up and in
and around and through, feeling the flow with some sense
that she has never had before but also has always had,
somewhere in herself.

And somewhere ahead of her in that flow, that new and old
sense finds something that draws her, something she
wants to see.  That something is where she is going,
waving her legs behind her and knifing her arms forward
through the red roiling heart of the lizard.

She has been in the Innerness before, a long empty time
ago.  That time and this time merge in her mind as she
flies through the midst of the world (cleaner than she
has ever been, every atom of extra matter burned away in
the pain that become bliss).

That first time she was a youth; now she is older, weighted
by experience.  The first time was half an accident, half a
youthful stupidity, rashness, fascination.  This time it is
like her life beginning again.  That first time it was the
odd Architor in the red-winged hood that pulled her out and
spirited her away from the edge of the town's Innerness;
this time it will be, she resolves, only her own choice
ever to leave again.

Now she feels other oddnesses, other tugs, in the flow, and
she feels other presences at various distances from her,
also moving (or is it just the flow moving around them?),
with senses that are awakening slowly, but more with every
passing heartbeat, every thick quick fluid motion of her
intertwined legs pushing her forward, toward that first
something that she felt.

She is moving so fast now that she feels, sees, senses herself
moving in the image in her mind, and that motion in that still
floating image is nearly as shocking as the motion of the
lizard itself, the terrible splaying of the feet and arching
of the back, but the shock is a good shock, a strong one and
a pure.

She approaches the something quickly, and realizes that it
is near the surface, or at the surface, and the idea of
emerging back into the cold and the dark slows her.  But
it does not slow her enough to prevent her emerging, rising
out of the red (the dark and cold spreading down her head
and around her shoulders and her body and down her legs),
and standing dripping at the edge of an Innerness, under
the black sky, her eyes blinking, her eye tendrils (which
are fat and backswept and writhing when she speeds through
the red) stiffening and searching.

And when the red has left her eyes, she sees before her
on the bright but dark ground the loveliest person she
has ever imagined.  She takes a step toward her, and the
lovely person opens her mouth and screams.

XIII

When Ot screamed, she screamed at the utter unexpectedness
of it all, at the loudness and the brightness and the arching
of the lizard's back, at the close heat of this tear in the
skin, this new-opened Innerness, and finally at the tall
dripping figure, rising from where she had imagined nothing
rising.

But she sees after a moment that it is only a person, a
tall and wild-looking person, a person gasping and shaking
the searing liquid off herself, but a person entirely
undamaged and unconsumed by what she has just arisen from.

The person from the Innerness is looking at Ot with a
complex fascination.  Her eye tendrils point outward,
in interest or even fascination.  As, in fact, Ot's own
tendrils are pointing, as the tall person takes another
step forward, and curls her legs and comes down beside
her.

Tercel Vellome, the granch who has gone from a town right
of the spine, across much of the tailward back in search of
a wild Innerness out of the control of the Architors, and
now down and in and through, to this sudden tear in the
skin of the world, just tailward of the head, just headward
of the back, where the skin is rich and wrinkled, and
something has torn a hole in it.

The sight of this slim young person crouching by the side
of the Innerness, her eye tendrils forward and now no fear
in her eyes, is to Vellome one with the rushing searing joy
of swimming through the red, one with the burning pain of
having the dirt burned from the crevases of her body by
the terrible kiss of the Innerness.

These are the notions of beauty among the supple grey-skinned
people that live on the great lizard floating in the void
between the stars and the other stars.

In the tailward towns, where the sickness is heavy and
fragrant on the air, beauty is simply being alive, being
ambulatory, coherent, being able to move and think and
find good for yourself.  A person with a rare free and easy
moment will sit with her back to something, and watch her
friends who are able to speak and think go about their
businesses, and think how beautiful they are, compared
to what they could be.

Tailward, they think of those from the towns on the back,
along the spine, as beautiful, whole stretches of skin
where every person has two arms, two legs, functional
fingers and toes, working eyes.  In those towns, on
the hind end of the spine, they look with longing
toward the top of the spine, and the neck, where people
are all strong and tall and healthy, without coughs
or staggers or sudden fits of forgetting.

Beauty in the tailward towns is about simple function;
at the bottom of the spine, about health and efficiency.
At the top of the back, in below the neck, beauty is
counted a subtler thing, about not only health but the
clear manifestations of health; about flesh that is well
bathed and eye tendrils that are whole and fat and active.
It is not enough, there, not to cough; one ought to have
a clear and a strong voice, like those from the neck and
(waxing poetic) those from beyond the archways.

In the rooms ringing those real archways, and within the
parts of the complex just beyond them (for over the long
long body of time the two cultures have blended together
more than either would admit), beauty is refinement, is
a subtle and elusive thing that becomes more common as
you go (if you were, indeed, entitled to go) headward,
into the depths of the complex, the rooms where the
inhabitants (graceful, strong, full of song, dressed in
the finest of thin pounded exudate) go from youth to
forever without seeing the open skin or even the
archways.

Beauty in the archway town and the tailward part of the
head, then, is about the fine motion of the eye tendrils,
the carriage of the limbs, the suppleness of the arms and
legs, as though they had more bones even than they do, or
no bones at all, just twining ropes of subtle and flexible
muscle.

And what do they use for beauty at the apex, at the forward
parts of the head?  What was Ot, delivered as a memoryless
youth, as all youths are memoryless, to that blessed part
of the lizard, what was she trained on, what did she, what
does she (sitting, half fallen backwards away from the
lip of the sudden Innerness, eye tendrils pointing at
this tall hot figure) what does she think is beautiful?

Life in the forward parts of the head is luxury unaware of
itself.  Song, and long stretches of empty relaxed time, and
rooms of ripe food, and books, and the thoughts of companions.
Beauty there is the shape of thought, beauty is the sweep
of existence, abstractly construed, the fact of reality, the
crystalline mystery of the universe, of the being of being.

Looking into the eyes of this burning stranger, Ot feels
that she has met a new piece of that reality, one wild and
strange and especially beautiful.

Torcel, looking into the eyes of this fine and perfect
person, this soft and supple and elegant figure, feels
that she has met someone from a story, a story of long
ago and far away, and the fountains of the Head.

Before these two notions of beauty can do more than
see each other, much more than consider what the other's
presence might mean, here on the edge of this terrible
lovely spontaneous rift in the skin of the world, there
is another with them.

The Architor seems to come from nowhere. (Are those drops
of red at the edge of her robe?  Has she arisen from another
part of the Innerness while the two were seeing only each
other?  Heat spills from her, but heat spills from everything
here, and Architors are never cool.)  Her face is hidden
by her hood, which has sweeping shapes of red on the sides.

She approaches them quickly along the lip of the tear, but
not so quickly that Torcel cannot twist her body around and
plunge back in, screaming and opening herself and twisting
into the redness and away.  (But not far away, stopping
within sight, or what sense passes for sight when full of
the searing red, of the bottom edge of the tear, that drawing
oddity in the flow, tensing herself to rush upward again.
Were the sweeps of red on that hood familiar?)

And Ot, now wishing for nothing more than to uncoil entirely
and lie on her back on the hot skin and look at the stars,
watches the Architor hesitate by the edge as Torcel (as the
tall beautiful figure) twists and plunges in, and then with
a resigned and frustrated motion turn back to her, and hold
out an arm.

"The Architors," says the voice from under the hood, "-- the
other Architors -- will be here in a moment.  Will you come
with me into the Innerness?"  The voice is soft and sibilant,
but very clear.

Ot shakes her head and slides backward, away from the edge and
away from the Architor.  With a snarl of impatience, the hooded
figure reaches out a long supple arm and takes her by the
wrist.  "Then come, this way, quickly."

And she tugs Ot to her feet and pulls her away from the lip,
in another direction.  The two of them stumble and tumble down
and away from the hill, the swell in the skin, where the
thing from the sky hit and tore and made the new Innerness.

Ot's mind is whirling from too many shocks; the sound and
the light, the miracle of the wild Innerness, the tall
wild stranger dripping red, and now this Architor, this
odd but familiar Architor, and the strong grip on her wrist,
pulling her deeper into the unfamiliar.

Within the searing red, Torcel floats immersed in thick
roiling bliss, waving her arms and twined legs to hold
herself still, or something like still, near where she can
feel the oddness in the flow that is the opening to the
surface.  Looking about her, with her eyes or with the
strange but familiar new sense, she finds she can see flows
converging on this point from many directions, weaving in
and out between other flows to and from other places,
going into the dark place (darkness is coolness, the cold
of the surface) and coming away from it again.

Floating here, next to such an obvious landmark in the
red, Torcel knows she is exposed.  If she is right about
the Architors, about the way of the world, there will be
more Architors here in moments.  Opening her mouth and filling
her body with the heat and the red, she wriggles up to the
surface, rising only enough to free her eyes.  The fluid
of the Innerness flows off of her head (cold, so cold under
the black of the sky) and off of her eyes, and she looks
around, spinning herself with sweeps of her hands.

The lovely kneeling gray figure is gone, the strange
Architor is gone. (Was the pattern of that hood one she
has seen before?  Or is that an illusion of memory?)
There is nothing to see here.  She curls around herself
and turns around, head down deep into the heat.  Her arms
and legs drive her quickly in and away.  Are there other
forms in the flow as she moves, person-size forms moving
up toward the surface dark as she dives down into the
brightness of the deep?

In the image of the world in her mind, she sees herself
moving not headward, not tailward, not left or right,
but deep, downward and inward.  The lizard floats unmoving,
and within it she flees, the hot red flowing over her
skin, burning and soothing at once, sweet and liquid
around and within her.

XIV

"This was not supposed to happen," the red-hooded
Architor says to Ot.  They are sitting on a low burl,
their backs to a supporting wall, sheltered by a screen
of vines and the canyons of the lizard.  Behind her head,
the skin is cool (warm, but cool, cooler than the heat
around the Innerness) and rough; she pushes her head
against it and rubs.  Her fingers are twined together,
and she wonders if she will need the pain.

"You wished to go into the Innerness feet foremost, and
only up to your shoulders.  You wished to have a child,
and to keep the child, and to raise it yourself."

Ot only looks at her.  The Architor's voice is tired.

"Do you still wish these things?"

"I do.  They will happen."

The Architor shakes her head.

"I arranged for your freedom, you know, from seclusion
in the Head.  I watched you go through the complex,
through that decadent maze, on a path you could not
have known existed, straight from the baths and the
gardens to the Archways."

Ot wonders at this, wonders if it is true, or if she
was seen by numerous Architors who have reported her
to this one, or if this one is simply making it up,
from having seen her there, and seeing her here.

"The soldiers do not love the Architors," the hooded
voice says.

"Why have you brought me here?"

"I did not arrange your escape so that you could be
found out here, and taken back, or taken tailward,
or whatever my sisters would do with you, in the
circumstances."

"The circumstances?"

"The skin has been breached.  Something has happened in
the sky, something has fallen to the skin of the lizard,
and the skin has been broken.  This has not happened in
any living memory.  This was not supposed to happen."

"And what was supposed to happen?"

The Architor stands, stiffly.  Ot wonders if she is
injured, or very tired, or if perhaps she is old, like
En in the complex is old.  And thinking of En she
thinks of Na, and thinking of Na she is sad, and very
tired herself.  She stretches her legs before her,
and leans her back backward, and rests, looking up
at the sky and the stars.  One of the other stars
flashes across her vision, a long line of cold blue
light that persists for a long moment and then dies.

"What was supposed to happen?" repeats the Architor,
softly, as if to herself.  "What was supposed to
happen?  I released you so that you could persue
your will, so that you could fly about the world as
a loose spark in the wind, so that you could confuse
and frustrate my sisters."

"What are the architors?" asks Ot, in a distant and
restful voice, her mind already up among the hard sparks
of the stars.

The Architor with the red-winged hood has begun to pace
back and forth in the viny space, but now she stops and
turns to Ot, and is silent for a long moment.  Ot's
body is relaxed, her eyes on the sky.  The Architor
turns away from her before she speaks, and again it is
as though she is speaking to herself.

"How did one brought up so softly become so hard, and
so sharp?" she murmurs.  "What are the Architors?  Best
ask what is the world, what is the universe."

"I could tell a story," the voice continues, from under the
hood, "I could tell a story about ancient beings, beings
living so long ago, and so strangely different from anything
you have seen or imagined, that 'being' is the only word
that you have that would fit them.

"I could say that these beings were powerful beyond words,
just as they were strange beyond words, and that it amused
them to create worlds, out in the starry void.  And that they
created this world, in the form of a splay-legged lizard, and
that it was neither the strangest of the worlds that they
created, nor the least strange.  It amused them to put life
onto the world, lizards on the lizard, and it amused them at
last to put people onto the world, to look out at the stars
and inward at the lizard, and to wonder and be cruel.

"In this story, we Architors, for I will count myself as an
Architor in this story, as they sometimes count me as one, and
I sometimes count myself as one, we Architors are from outside
the world, from another world that floats also in the starry
dark, but that is as distant from this lizard world as one
of the stars, more distant than the other stars, and more
distant than you can imagine, as the beings that created the
world are more strange and more potent than you (or than I)
can imagine."

Ot lay on her back listening to the murmuring voice, resting,
not listening, not understanding now, but perhaps saving the
voice and the words for understanding later.  The sky was
black, as the sky was always black, and the stars hard and
bright, and none of the other stars appeared to her while the
Architor spoke.

"You cannot imagine travel between the worlds, among the stars,
and for all of that neither can I, nor any of my sisters the
Architors.  We are from that other world, but we are also from
here, and we none of us remember the journey.  But we have
been told certain things, and shown certain things, that we
are forbidden to repeat.

"My sisters, perhaps, take these things at their face value,
and that makes them what they are.  I, perhaps, suspect these
things, look below the surface of these things, and that makes
me what I am."

Here the Architor looks up and over, directly at the supple
grey form of Ot lying at rest on the cool warm skin, and is
silent for a long moment.

"What was supposed to happen?  You, with your blind and
stubborn will, demanding that you will go into the Innerness
feet foremost, only up to your shoulders, and that you shall
have your child and raise it alone--"

And here the Architor stops speaking again.  Above Ot, outside
Ot's eyes, the sky is still clear and still and dark.  Tercel
Vellome, who was a granch and is now a shape swimming through
the searing red, is diving deeper into the center of the world,
the center of the lizard.  The red is hotter there, but also
thicker, and she finds herself moving more slowly, but no less
encased in bliss.

The Architor sighs, and resumes speaking.  Now she is looking
at Ot, or at least her hood is turned toward Ot, as she speaks.
Perhaps she is no longer speaking to herself.  Or perhaps she
is.

"You, with your blind and obstinate will, were to taste seclusion
for awhile, and then to escape.  You were to stumble here and
there within the complex for a time, lost and alone, and I was
eventually to guide you to certain places, and certain people,
that I keep prepared."

"You must be very lonely."  Ot says this softly but suddenly,
her voice still distant, but warmer.  She has been thinking
of Na, and of seclusion, and the sweet ripe taste of the food
in Na's food rooms.

The Architor is silent again, perhaps taken aback, perhaps
thinking.  The hood turns upward, toward the stars.  If Ot
were looking, she might see something of the face within
the hood.  But she is not.

"I must be very lonely," the voice repeats, from the
half-uncovered face under the hood.  "I suppose I must.
But not because I am alone.  My sisters tolerate me.
My sisters, I sometimes think, know of everything that
I do, and allow it because at some level they consider
it necessary.  They think, perhaps, that the chaos I
introduce into their system is useful to its stability.

"Sometimes I fear that indeed it is."

Now there is a silence more profound in that place.  And
within the world there is a silence around Torcel Vellome.
She, Vellome, only realizes that there has been sound within
the red when that sound is damped, quieted, thickened as the
red becomes thicker, closer to the hot heart of the lizard.
The swimming is slower, but no harder.

On the surface of the world, there is the small sound of
something moving in the vine leaves near where Ot and the
Architor sit silent.  There is no wind.  Far away, tailward,
Nartabee Silgilesh, Curatan Silgilesh, Taraban Eluctog (whose
feet are too large and who has visions) and Torgano Fonato
(who was Torgan Fonat) are nursing each other's wounds and
scavenging news in the ruins of the tailward town (which was
not much more than a ruin to begin with), where a dozen
tattered people with various degrees of the sickness are
rebuilding the (never more than ramshackle) house around
their shallow but precious pool of water.

The story of the granch and the time the lizard moved is
already becoming legend, repeated by a dozen throats, and
soon a hundred, and soon a thousand.

Now the granch stops in her slow swimming through the thick
blissful hot red, because she has caught a taste of something,
or a smell of something (taste, or smell, or again some new
sense that comes of being in the Innerness and being a
different creature for it, although not as different as she
will be), and that something is odd and out of place, sharp
and metallic, somehow unmistakably Other.

She twists her body around (arms still above her head, legs
still coiled together behind her in a supple helical swimming
tail), and around again, seeking the odd smell or taste or
touch.  There is nothing, and she straightens out and continues
on, but then there is something again, that same something,
barely perceptible.

She looks around with all her old and new senses, and there in
the red, deep in the deep Innerness, there is a trail.  A path
of differentness (darker, colder, or just oddly scented, subtly
odd in taste or feel if you know exactly what you are looking
for?) leads from somewhere above (from the tear in the skin of
the world? what other place above would be reeking with Other
now?) to somewhere below, still deeper into the pulsing core
of the lizard.

Torcel Vellome, the granch, turns head down again, and burrows
inward, looking for the end of that path.

Ot is still looking at the sky.  Something touches her arm, and
she turns her head lazily.  The Architor in the hood with the
sweeps of red on the sides is beside her, gently shaking her by
the shoulder.

"I must go, soon," the Architor says, her voice now more present
and direct.  "Since you will not wander lost in the complex to
be guided by my subtle promptings, and since something has
fallen into the world that may upset all of my plans, I will
tell you of a place to go, and trust to you to decide to go
there, or not."

Ot's eye tendrils go slowly from the relaxed droop of deep
rest to a more attentive waving.  She sits up on the burl and
looks at the Architor (within the hood there is, after all,
only a face; a passably ordinary face, although somehow
rougher, different in a way she cannot settle her mind on).

Within the world, Torcel Vellome thinks that the oddness,
the smell or flavor, is getting stronger, and the path
more distinct.  It, she, turns this way and that through
the redness, as though whatever passed here and left the
trail was buffeted about by the flow of the Innerness,
tossed like a vine leaf in the wind.

"There is a place that you might go," the Architor says to
Ot, "a place at the front of the world, forward of the complex,
nestled beneath its walls.  I would have guided you there
from the complex itself, through an old corridor that only
I remember, but since you are out here now, and not going
back in, you will have to go around."

"Around?"

"Around the complex on the head, around the crown, to the
forward side.  There is someone there that you might meet."

"Is there an Innerness?  Will I have my child, and raise the
child myself?"

The Architor stretches her sinuous arms above her head; it is
a gesture of weariness, one that Ot has seldom seen, in her
rooms forward.

"There is an Innerness.  For the rest, you must make your own
way."

The strange scent or flavor or feel in the red roiling Innerness
is stronger now.  It fills the granch with the taste of Other.
Ahead through the bright heat of the medium in which she swims,
Torcel Vellome sees something, or thinks she sees something,
something large and bulky, turning in the currents of red.

"Tell me," Ot says.  She is sitting up very straight, and her
fingers are splayed apart on her legs.  "I would like to see
a place forward of the complex, nestled up under its walls."
Although she wonders, also, if she will be moving away from
the tall wild stranger that she saw, so briefly, at the tear
in the skin, at the strange sudden Innerness, the Innerness
of noise and light.

The Architor sighs, and tells her.

Torcel Vellome is close to the Other now.  She thinks of it as
the Other, because it smells tastes feels of distance and
difference.  It is, in its core, a large round (irregularly
round, like a lump of exudate not yet pounded) dark (cool)
something.  Surrounding that something, though, are more layers
of Otherness.

The outer layer is a grainy grey halo that merges imperceptibly
into the searing red; this is what carried the Otherness, the
smell and taste and feel of it, to Torcel and into her body as
she moved through the lizard.

The inner layer, between that grainy grey and the dark body of
the Other's core, is a dark writhing that tries to reach out
through the outer layer to grasp (Torcel thinks it looks like
a million hands, or curving arms), but where it meets the red
it shrivels and retreats, back into itself.  The undulations of
the inner layer are complex and nuanced, and Torcel the granch
feels that they are speaking, but in a way that she does not
understand.

Ot listens to the Architor, more intently than she has listened
to anyone for a long time (is this Architor, she thinks, her
fourth Mentor?).  As the voice speaks from under the hood,
of the path around the complex to the front of the head, of
places to avoid and people to seek out, Ot plots the journey
on the image of the world in her mind.

XV

In the thick searing red place far beneath the skin of
the world, Torcel Vellome, who has been a granch in the
tailward towns, is pushing herself inward toward the Other,
through the fog of the grainy outer corona, in toward the
infoldings and outreachings of the million dark writhing
arms.

She could not have said then, and could never have said
thereafter, why she swam and pushed so determinedly
toward the center of that strangeness, just as she could