The orphan began to hear itself think.

Not the whole pandemonium; it couldn't give voice—or even gestalt—to everything at once. Out of the myriad associations every scene from the library evoked, only a few symbols at a time could gain control of the nascent language production networks. And though birds were wheeling in the sky, and the grass was waving, and a cloud of dust and insects was rising up in the animals' wake—and more, much more… the symbols which won out before the whole scene vanished were:

"Lion chasing antelope."

Startled, the navigator cut off the flood of external data. The linear words cycled from channel to channel, distinct against the silence; the gestalt images summoned up the essence of the chase again and again, an idealized reconstruction shorn of all forgotten details.

Then the memory faded to black, and the navigator reached out to the library again.

The orphan's thoughts themselves never shrank to a single orderly progression—rather, symbols fired in ever richer and more elaborate cascades—but positive feedback sharpened the focus, and the mind resonated with its own strongest ideas. The orphan had learned to single out one or two threads from the symbols' endless thousand-strand argument. It had learned to narrate its own experience.

The orphan was almost half a megatau old, now. It had a vocabulary of ten thousand words, a short-term memory, expectations stretching several tau into the future, and a simple stream of consciousness. But it still had no idea that there was such a thing in the world as itself.

The conceptory mapped the developing mind after every iteration, scrupulously tracing the effects of the randomized indeterminate fields. A sentient observer of the same information might have visualized a thousand delicate interlocking fractals, like tangled, feathery, zerogee crystals, sending out ever-finer branches to crisscross the womb as the fields were read and acted upon, and their influence diffused from network to network. The conceptory didn't visualize anything; it just processed the data, and reached its conclusions.