Prologue
Thin Enough to Receive It
They dreamed before they woke.
I would not call it a mercy. I would call it a rehearsal, and I would not say whose.
There were forty accounts afterward. Thirty-seven described water.
This agreement impressed several people. It impressed me less. People who have shared an experience frequently mistake agreement about its setting for agreement about the experience itself.
The water was black in twenty-nine accounts and without colour in eight. Three remembered no water at all, although two of these described the sensation of descending.
All forty remembered pressure.
None remembered breathing.
This was the first inconsistency I considered useful.
The dream began differently for each of them.
One stood on a shore.
Another woke already beneath it.
A man called Varro remembered falling through water for so long that he became certain there could be no bottom. When the bottom appeared beneath his feet, he was offended by it.
Mara remembered rain.
This was peculiar enough that I asked her twice.
"Rain."
"Under the water?"
"No."
"Before it?"
"No."
"After?"
She looked at me for some time.
"During."
I recorded this as given.
The details differed. The sequence did not.
Three small things came first.
Small is relative. The shortest was described as taller than a man. One had wings. One had too many joints. The third was remembered so differently that I found no value in attempting a common description.
They killed all three.
I use killed because that is the word the forty used. Later we preferred banished, for reasons that will become relevant.
In the dream, the distinction did not trouble them.
Then came three larger things.
The first required several of them to act together.
The second hurt them.
The third killed some of them.
This last fact produced considerable disagreement after waking, since every one of the forty was alive.
I did not regard this as especially mysterious.
Dreams routinely permit a person to observe his own death. People accept this without difficulty until someone asks them to put it in writing.
The forty remembered those deaths differently.
They agreed on what followed.
They continued.
After the sixth thing fell, the water changed.
Not in colour.
In depth.
Every account contains some version of this.
The sea had seemed enormous until then. Afterward, they understood that they had been moving across its surface.
Something was beneath them.
Several described the recognition as visual. This cannot be right. There was nothing to see at first.
Others described a sound.
Mara did not.
She said the rain stopped.
Then the city appeared.
I have called it a city because architecture requires fewer assumptions than the alternatives. There were walls. There were angles. There were structures whose size implied use, though not use by anything built like us.
The forty descended between them.
No one remembered choosing to do so.
At the bottom was something asleep.
