I startled alert, out of a dreamless void. The sex-obsessed sequences that had gone on interminably were gone. The weird voices were back-different ones this time. I tried to speak and managed to say: "Who? Who are you?"

"Stink and wonders! He be witful. What profit him to cry?" "We be Friends."

"So be our calling, Mr. Charlie. We be Friends of the Measuring Class Not of

Niels Abel."

'What?" I didn't understand. "Where am I?"

"You be Mr. Charlie in the lock-hole, at the hinge-split of the world." "Huh?"

"Wold I, nold I."

I was utterly confused. "I can't see," I complained. "I'm blind. Who are you? Where am I?"

"Spark his eyes, say I."

Briefly, sight returned to me-though I wished it hadn't. I was lying on a mirror-polished floor, cinnabar red, and reflected in it was my face-or not my face, not the features I remembered, but something like a hog-nosed snake with lidless human eyes peering from sea-anemone stalks and the pink cauliflower of brain matter all encased in a gel pod and chrome net. That was me? A scream roiled within me but could find no way through the cage of my shock. What had happened to the gift of my face? Where were my limbs, my torso? I huddled in the hut of my heart, stared meekly upward and saw-among tufts of dandelion seed lifting into the green air, human figures in transparent armor and, beyond them, the polished floor running toward vermilion sandstone arches and the antlers of dusk. Suddenly, my mind felt fragile.

"He be hearty, all right, and wind in his whiskers, as well!"

One of the armored figures had said that and gestured at me. I peered more closely at-it: It had a face of black glass or gelatin, flexible, expressive, a teenager's face, boy or girl, I couldn't tell. The lake of its dark features was placid, clear enough that I could see the cumulus cloud of its brain enlarging with the thunder of a dangerous thought. "Wax me mind! He be witful for sure.