“Goodness!” To fight this, Pry fought/he'd thought/he'd - open a passage into Old Works that -

Out the corner of his third forehead-eye the Ontological Wound saw in Pry's mind:

He was seeing a corridor. He sweated to see it that way. He sweated to transport between those three worlds what it contained. This thing for the other and this thing for the first. He saw a corridor that connected them in a system of them, with all those other connections combined out that together – he was part of something much larger.

Dream fuel from Hortag. Fresh fared off the fantasies of billions of television tube units; organs in with the rest of it, processed, refined, turned into something else in those vast Theustian vats beneath the - buildings themselves – organs; breathing organs, thrilling organs, pulsing organs. He saw the images from Shensh; he saw the finished manufactured biotechnological products from Theust he - saw -

He saw Old Works. He saw it exchanging. He saw what no way could in any universe be exchanged – exchange – he saw it happen. He saw the confected universe function because he was – because he had the talent to see it that way. Trained, developed, educated in the ideology that made it in anyway appropriate, acceptable, a thing that would be good to do.

For a flash, he saw it as it really was, seeing that corridor, and the produce, the products, the people; transported through it between those three planets, disconnected, in no way connectible upon any material plane.

It was entirely unnatural. That this whole thing should function. That all Hortag had to offer was organs. That all Theust had to offer was madness... That all Shensh had to offer was dream.

And yet the way they saw it. Him. Tarr-Saik. Brey-BreLoak [cL^YoP***]. Puaz-Byt. Phinz-Twoan. Him, them; any of them. Clua-Sryh. In the way that she – she also saw things in a fashion.

He got a flash of it. He saw the whole thing now. It was because he was exhausted. It was because he was sweating watching this thing exist, making it exist by means of his watching. - It was for this reason. He was tired. He had nothing. He'd been standing here months. A Cyclops. Using his talent to see.

They had been convinced it was virtuous, their entire culture, but how – how had they been forced to see that this – that this thing they were artificially keeping alive was in any way – was in any way worth anything whatsoever?

That this was good.

He watched a Theustian Science Priest, hooded/grey-robed. Hunched. Glaring. Psychotic eyes. Hood-light flashing his grimaces in stilled images. He saw - it -

Push a trolley of glass jars and what each of those glass jars contained. Three, four year old children. No eyelids. Brains exposed, half of them carved out and replaced with weird instruments the purposes of which Pry couldn't guess. There was a screen attached to a unit that connected each of the jars of children. Seeing this corridor exist intentionally, Pry couldn't help for a second alighting on the eyes of one of -

And he knew what the machine did.