Ptolemy's Gate

human nor completely otherwise. She could not distinguish their nature—each one seemed almost to cancel itself out. Below it all, in some remote corridor, she saw a youth fixed in a running posture, face turned over his shoulder; behind him was a figurine that moved —a man with a knife, legs going slowly, boots covering ground. And about them both, different shapes, remote and indistinct . . .
    Kitty felt a certain detached curiosity about all this, but her real interest lay elsewhere. The ringing sound was louder than before; somewhere very close. She concentrated still harder, and slightly to her surprise the pretty little latticework of stones and figures distorted and twisted out of focus, as if pulled in four directions all at once. First it was quite clear, next it had blurred into a smudge; then even the smudge had gone.
    Kitty felt a rushing on all sides; not a physical sensation, for she was not aware of having an actual body, but a conceptual one. Dimly she glimpsed four barriers all around her: they towered above, plummeted below, stretched to infinity on either side. One was dark and solid, and threatened to crush her with remorseless weight; the next was a raging fluid, which surged avidly to carry her away. The third barrier tore at her with the unseen tumult of a hurricane; the fourth was an implacable wall of unquenchable fire. All four beat upon her for an instant only, then they recoiled. With reluctance, they gave her up and Kitty passed through the Gate to the other side.

28

    It was as well for Kitty that she experienced what followed with the detachment of an observer, rather than as a helpless participant—if it had been otherwise, she would immediately have gone mad. As it was, the lack of bodily sensation gave what she saw a certain dreamlike quality. Curiosity was her main emotion.
    She found herself in—well, in did not seem quite appropriate: she found herself part of a ceaseless swirl of movement, neither ending nor beginning, in which nothing was fixed or static. It was an infinite ocean of lights, colors, and textures, perpetually forming, racing, and dissolving in upon themselves, though the effect was neither as thick or solid as a liquid nor as traceless as a gas; if anything it was a combination of the two, in which fleeting wisps of substance endlessly parted and converged.
    Scale and direction were impossible to determine, as was the passing of time-—since nothing remained still and no patterns were ever repeated, the concept itself seemed blank and meaningless. This mattered little to Kitty, and it was only when she attempted to locate herself, with a view to establishing her position in her surroundings, that she grew a little disconcerted. She had no fixed point, no singularity to call her own; indeed, she seemed often to be in several places at once, watching the whirling traces from multiple angles. The effect was most disorientating.
    She tried to fix upon a particular fleck of color and follow it, but found it no easier than following the motion of a single leaf in a distant windblown tree. As soon as it formed, each color split, melted, merged with others, shrugged off the responsibility of being itself. Kitty grew dizzy with the looking.
    To make matters worse she began to notice something else too, flicking in and out of existence within the general swirl— random images, so fleeting she could not pin them down—like photographs turned on and off by crackling electric light. She tried to work out what they were, but the movement was too fast. This filled her with frustration. She sensed they might have told her something.
    After an unknown duration Kitty remembered that she had come here for a purpose, although what that purpose was she could not recall. She had no inclination to do anything particularly; her main impulse was to remain exactly as she was, moving among the rushing lights. . .Nevertheless something about the ceaseless change irritated her and kept her separate from it. She wanted to impose a little order, some solidity. But how could she do this when she lacked solidity herself?
    Halfheartedly she willed herself to move toward a particular patch of orange and maroon swirling at an unknown distance. To her surprise, she moved all right, but in several discordant directions; when her vision stabilized, the patch of color was no closer than before. She tried several times with the same result: her movements were veering and haphazard; it was