Second, someone or something had interfered with his method of what he called sleeping with one eye open, which meant his ability kept a partial on standby alert, watching the data streaming through the dreaming mind of mad Tellus watching for spikes or strange attractors in the cliometric chords and glissandos of the symphony of history.

Third, something was strange about his eyes. The darkness inside of his eyelids did not have the normal pattern of phosphenes he expected upon waking from slumber. This in turn indicated that his entire brain capacity, roughly equal to a logic diamond the size of the core of the planet Mercury, or to a mountain of compressed murk substance, had been fitted inside one mobile biological body.

This was starkly impossible, unless he had been transferred without his knowledge into another body. The fact that he did not feel a sense of shock implied one of two things: either his subconscious mind had been subliminally conditioned or prepared to receive the knowledge that he was waking in a new body without a shock, or the new mental geometry he occupied was better able to adapt without shock to new paradigms than his old.

But, then, what was this feeling of lightness, of joy, this sensation he remembered from his childhood? He recalled waking up in the wee hours of Christmas morning, long before the sun was up, unwilling to step out of bed for fear of waking the snoring hulks of his many older brothers, unwilling to put his unshod foot on the cold, hard, harsh floor. Instead, he hovered between sleep and waking, wrapped in the warmth of the rough blankets impregnated with antiseptics and antibiotics, like floating in a cocoon, safe from the fear that winter would come and never leave, eager with a greedy, happy elation of expectation, that only a day of gifts and feasts and visits and pine trees shining with ornaments provoke or fulfill. It was a day too wonderful to be true.

But then again, no, this sensation was different.

His elation was like dark woodsmoke, earthy, primal, rising as if from his blood and bone marrow, his cells and glands. It was not the joy of a youth getting a toy but of a man who gives himself so utterly to another that he forgets himself entirely. It was a sensation of conquest and surrender.

He remembered his first time seeing the cleavage of a buxom young swimmer in a bathing suit when he went to Soko University on the West Coast. It was the type of skimpy, clinging, immodest garb no proper Texan lass ever donned; but San Francisco was owned by the Sumitomo Zaibatsu, and things were different there. She was the captain of the swim team, which was closed to Texans and Northeastermen, even though Menelaus could outswim the shrimpy city boys on the team.

Her name was Hoshiko. Her eyes were bright as agates, and her dark hair fell past her hips, and she barely came up to his elbow. He had asked her to let him escort her to the Bon festival and the dance. She looked, if anything, even more adorable in her yukata than in her bathing suit. No other Mestizo freshman dared to court a yellow girl, because they feared the Nisei boys; and the Nisei boys feared her too much to court her themselves, because she was as pretty as an idol and sharp as a whip. (As for Menelaus, the evening when four young toughs followed him into a dark alley, where he had had the forethought to park a fire axe behind a trashcan, to express their discontent with the gaijin dancing with the pretty Japifornian girl, had been one of the shortest of the many altercations of his life. Three of the boys ran away as fast as their legs could carry them, with their leader hopping after as fast as his remaining leg could carry him.)

Earlier, he remembered his first crush on a dark-haired, hazel-eyed beauty from Austin, a girl he saw only twice a year, at fair time. Her name was Jacqueline.

Earlier again, he remembered his first kiss, stolen from his cousin Lizzy during a Christmas dance, and he had to manhandle her under the mistletoe to have a proper excuse and fight his cousin Lenny the next day, skinning his knuckles and knees and ending up with bits of Lenny’s ear in his teeth.

All these memories and more were in the background. In the foreground was a joy too bright to stare at, like the sun.

So there might have been a third reason why he felt no shock. He was too damned happy.

He opened his eyes, and they were filled with water, and he opened his mouth and choked. The unpleasant medicinal indignities of waking from long-term hibernation had changed, but they were still unpleasant.

He sat up, struck his head against what, at first, he thought was a coffin lid. But the surface, whatever it was, was instantly broken into shards and fragments about his head and shoulders. Fluid sluiced off him like soapsuds falling off a man who sits up in a bathtub.

The moonlight glaring in his damp eyes made a bright blur. Before he could blink his eyes clear and look around, from the texture and sound of the wind, he knew he was out of doors, but from the smell, or the lack of it, he could not imagine where. The sound was of a desolate, wide space, a solitude as broad as a desert. He heard no people moving nearby, no voices, no breathing, no birds, no sound of machinery, nothing.

He spat the fluid from his mouth. Another surprise: the fluid did not strike his chest as it fell. It did not fall, but sublimated instantly to vapor in his teeth. In fact, his chest and upper back, shoulders and arms likewise were bare and dry. The fluid had already vanished from his naked skin. There was no choking sensation in his lungs as normally accompanied switching from breathing hyperoxygenated liquid to breathing air. He felt no liquid in his lungs, but he felt a gush of mist from his nostrils, yet seemingly too small in volume to account for transition between fluid and air regimes. The implications of that were staggering: it implied a revolution of biotechnology at least, if the material was being so rapidly absorbed back into the cell lining of his lungs, or of physics at most, if it was being or reduced in mass or volume so suddenly, whisked away by means unknown.

He ran his wrist across his eyes, blinking and snorting. He touched his nose. It was still big and crooked. He felt his teeth with his tongue, and the small lump on his inner lip where he had fallen on his grandfather’s big wooden rocking chair when he was three years old, stitched up by the local horse-doctor, and it had never healed quite right. Whoever made this new mouth for him had put it together with the care and artistry of a professional counterfeiter. It made him feel right at home.

Then he looked around.

It was night. The moon and four other satellites he did not recognize were up. The moon was blue under layers of frozen oxygen, with the seas and oceans black with the debris of once-great forests and cities, now crushed into a strata of dark grit beneath the weight of the collapsed, failed atmosphere.

Despite the strangeness, the world he sat upon was Earth. But the land for miles and miles, as far as his eyes in the nocturnal gloom could pierce, was a flat and level shining surface like a mirror made of diamond, colorless in the blue moonlight. The world was as barren as a salt flat, empty of tower or house or highway, empty of bird or beast or bush or grass blade.

In a direction he deduced was west, the land fell away at a sharp cliff to a lower landscape no less flat and diamond-bright. There was a line of fog hovering over the middle distance of that lower glass plain, which might indicate the presence of a river canyon.

In the opposite direction, irregular peaks of white substance rose above the white surface, as if the mirror there were broken by some pressure from below, to form mountains. They looked black in the distance. The stars were bright, and the sky contained a few high clouds, tinged with sapphire in the blue moonlight, like ghostly feathers. He thought that was a good sign. It meant that somewhere, there was water on the surface of the globe.