Temetry’s dazzling smile is sad, forever, because I’ll never see him again. This place is no longer special or secret. She is huffing and panting her rooty head over the crater-lip. It is the last abiding image I have of him, because then comes the sound of old Ingen, and the moment is lost. “I’ll whisper your name to the branes until I die,” I promise him, feeling the urgency of this moment, alone in this crater for the last time. We are only 11, and I love him, because I know in my heart that he will never forget me. It is our joke, a vestige of what Subsidence has brought us both. His fingers tighten, rippling over mine in Euclidean gymnastics, until our hands are joined partway between a reticulated conch shell and an intersecting Klein bottle. His hand worms the grey sand, folds my fingers within his own, and I remember that he is the most beautiful thing I have. He turns to me, and smiles, because he knows I cannot keep that promise. “I won’t forget you,” I say to him quietly. ![]() The men of this world would have taken him for the Gideon heat-sink long ago. I know it, because he’d not be here with me if he had. ![]() This shrug means he’s had no breakthroughs. “How are your non-orientable insects?” I ask. He doesn’t speak, not since the last Bells came when we were babies, but I know what he’s thinking. I imagine it far overhead, arcing through the universe, plancking the anthropic landscape from yoke to clapper, and can think of only one word to describe it. ![]() ![]() At times we glimpse its Brilliance, the after-image of its long and branic toll splashing across the plush black firmament like an endless corolla borealis. It’s night, and I’m lying beside Temetry on a cold grey crater of this world’s endless desert, listening to the oscillations of the Bell.
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