I felt what was left of my abdomen crumble away. With the load suddenly lightened, my arm gave a hard yank … and snapped off at the shoulder.

I don’t think I could ever describe what it felt like as a ragged head and upper chest, sailing high enough to look down at my goal, the white surface where a human original was supposed to lay in comfort, blithely commanding obedient machinery to make cheap doubles — a perfect serving class that can’t rebel and always knows what to do.

How simple that used to seem!

During my flying arc, I wondered, Assuming I land okay, will I be able to use my chin and shoulder to maneuver around? To guide my head between the tendrils?

Would that automatically trigger imprinting, now that the START button had been pressed? If not, how was I to press it again? Problems, problems. And you know what? I would have found solutions, too. I know it. If that darn trajectory had just carried me where I wanted to go.

But like Moses, I could only watch the promised land from afar. Coming down, my head barely missed the platform, caroming off the copier’s edge and then against the wastebasket, knocking it off the chair so it tumbled, landing upright on the floor.

As if that weren’t enough, what happened next was the real capper.

I rolled across the seat and teetered for a fragile moment, then fell off to land (appropriately enough, at the end of one hell of a week) inside a receptacle labeled TRASH

What a sight that was.

The titanic Standing Wave blasted through both clay mirrors, hurling the pendulum — with ditYosil aboard — deep into a stony ceiling. Yet all the others who were standing around barely got singed. For the mighty wave distortion instantly turned on an axis that lay at right angles to every known direction, vanishing into a distance no living eye could follow.

Except for realAlbert, that is, who turned his head as if to track its departure, wearing a smile so enigmatic, so knowing, that Ritu and her twin brother simply stopped in their tracks. One moment they were rushing toward him with hands raised to strike. The next, they simply dropped their arms and backed away, staring at him.

Yes, the “anchor” is still attached, by a slender thread.

Shall we follow?

From the beginning, when brilliant, tormented Yosil Maharal still thought he could design and control everything, the beam’s first goal had been the nearest city. Where else could so many spirit-flickers be found close together, clustered like a tidy field of crops growing alongside a fallow prairie? It must have seemed a good place to harvest nourishment for the next step.

Had he bent his egomania enough to involve peers and collaborators — even a whole civilization — Yosil might have discovered and corrected all the flaws in his splendid plan. Technical and conceptual flaws. Moral flaws. But “mad scientist” is almost defined by solipsism — a neurotic need to avoid criticism and do everything alone.

Without Maharal, it might have taken another generation for humanity to make this attempt. Because of him, humanity could have been destroyed.

As it turns out, there is no plague tearing through the metropolis when the glazier arrives overheard. No charnelhouse of rapid pestilence providing enough death manna to gorge upon at length. Just a few thousand souls per day, cast free of their organic moorings by accident or natural causes, rise gently to the hovering waveform, finding welcome room for their vibratory modes. After some initial surprise, they add breadth and subtlety to a superposition of states …

But it’s no feast.

This Standing Wave won’t become a “god” by raw power alone.

Yosil’s simple plan has failed.

Time to try something else.

Turning sideways again, the macrowave pursues a scent that few ever noticed before. Out to sea it flies, two thousand kilometers, where blue pelagic currents course above deep trenches — an abode for cephalopods, some nearly as long as a supertanker, with eyes like dinner plates and brains reeking of high intelligence. Aliens, right here on Earth.

Is this it?

Plunging deep where sunlight never goes, we join the world of giant squid, sampling what it’s like to flow along by sphincter-driven water jet, touching and experiencing a liquid world with long suckers that dangle beyond the limits of vision. We feed. We chase, mate, and spawn. We compete and scheme by logic all our own, expressing concepts in warm flashes of intricate color along our flanks.

And, once in a great while, we also tremble and worship when Death comes plunging down at us from Hell, the hot world above. For that narrow instant, while fleeing desperately, we clasp and cherish something that glimmers like hope -

Then the devil is upon us, massive, black, devouring. His shrill voice strikes deep, paralyzing, turning guts to jelly! Then come jaws, small but powerful. White teeth reflect the protest pigmentations of our bioluminescent skin as they tear unto us, dragging us upward …

So, it wasn’t the giant squid who attracted the glazier beam this way. They’re so exotic, perhaps they’ll find another soulscape of their own.

It was their hunters who drew the macrowave here.

Sperm whales, returning from the crushing depths, their hunger sated on fresh cephalopod, now gather at the pleasant wavetops to breathe and splash. Though occupied with natural concerns — the quest for food and reproductive success — now and then as many as a dozen creatures congregate, touching massive brows.

Contained within, far larger than any other organ, is a mound of waxy substance, malleable as wet clay, subtle at refracting and reshaping sound, enabling these stalkers of the deep to propel cunning beams that find — and stun — their prey in utter darkness. Sculpted sound is to them as the dynamic recoloring of flesh is to squid, or syntactical word chains to a human being. All are ways to gossip, cooperate, deceive, meditate, or — when all else fails — seek urgent meaning in prayer.

The sperm whales congregate, flared tails pointing outward like a petaled flower, or mandala, or rose window. Brows meeting, they exchange complex sonic shapes/images/ideograms with properties that long ago emerged from the background noise of mere survival. Meanings congeal in the wax, delicate as spiderwebs, unique as snowflakes, multifarious as an ecosystem.

They were doing this long before Bevvisov learned to imprint souls in clay.

Off again!

Using so much energy, shouldn’t the glazier be growing hungry? There was beauty amid the squid and whales — but no great nourishment. Then why does the macrowave seem undisappointed as it rotates through an axis invented on the spot — twisting the very context out of which raw vacuum arose — then building speed on a course that it makes up as it goes?

We seem to have discovered outer space.

In flickering sequence we pass great sweeps of stars. Mammoth clusters of bright pinpoints roll by in leaps that devour emptiness as if it wasn’t there. Metric itself becomes a component of the wave, its ally in travel, rather than an obstacle.

Searching … examining … every now and then, we pause briefly to scrutinize — a red giant, tumid and swollen as it slowly expands, eating its children. Then — an aged white dwarf, born during the galaxy’s first generation. Having blown away much of its substance, it will (ironically) endure long ages more on a starvation diet, glittering faintly for no one — unlike a gluttonous blue super-giant, whose mere million years tick by with blazing speed. Far too massive for any other goal, it must choose glory over life — that is, until it’s cleaved by a surprising force, slicing the colossus in two. A singularity! Not a black hole, this one is long and stringy — an exceptional relic of creation, a faceted flaw in spacetime, deadly, gorgeous only to those who know its language of pure math — having already stirred turmoil when it passed through an immense molecular cloud, spinning vortices that self-gravitate, flattening to ionized skirts that whirl and merge into newborn systems — then on again we speed, past spiral arms that gleam like diamond dust, until — we find ourselves zooming down to a modest yellow sun … a star of pleasant middle age … a steady hearth, unpretentious, with a retinue of planet-specks — one of which seems luckier than most … warm-not-hot, massive-not-ponderous, wet-not-drowned, and kneaded by just enough falling objects to keep things interesting.