“That’s better!” Isaac announced over his shoulder to David. “Damn thing can clean again. Back to normal!”

Chapter 21

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

In the huge, crisp cocoon, extraordinary processes began.

The caterpillar’s swathed flesh began to break down. Legs and eyes and bristles and body-segments lost their integrity. The tubular body became fluid.

The thing drew on the stored energy it had drawn from the dreamshit and powered its transformation. It self-organized. Its mutating form bubbled and welled up into strange dimensional rifts, oozing like oily sludge over the brim of the world into other planes and back again. It folded in on itself, shaping itself out of the protean sludge of its own base matter.

It was unstable.

It was alive, and then there was a time between forms when it was neither alive nor dead, but saturated with power.

And then it was alive again. But different.

Spirals of biochymical slop snapped into sudden shapes. Nerves that had unwound and dissolved suddenly spun back into skeins of sensory tissue. Features dissolved and reknitted in strange new constellations.

The thing flexed in inchoate agony and a rudimentary, but growing, hunger.

Nothing was visible from the outside. The violent process of destruction and creation was a metaphysical drama played out without an audience. It was hidden behind an opaque curtain of brittle silk, a husk that hid the changing with a brute, instinctual modesty.

After the slow, chaotic collapse of form, there was a brief moment when the thing in the cocoon was poised in a liminal state. And then, in response to unthinkable tides of flesh, it began to construct itself anew. Faster and faster.

Isaac spent many hours watching the chrysalis, but he could only imagine the struggle of autopoiesis within. What he saw was a solid thing, a strange fruit hanging by an insubstantial thread in the musty darkness of a large hutch. He was perturbed by the cocoon, imagining all manner of gigantic moths or butterflies emerging. The cocoon did not change. Once or twice he prodded it gingerly, and set it rocking gently and heavily for a few seconds. That was all.

Isaac watched and wondered about the cocoon when he was not working on his engine. It was that that took most of his time.

Piles of copper and glass began to take shape on Isaac’s desk and floor. He spent his days soldering and hammering, attaching steam-pistons and thaumaturgic engines to the nascent engine. His evenings he spent in pubs, in discussion with Gedrecsechet, the Palgolak Librarian, or David or Lublamai, or ex-colleagues from the university. He spoke carefully, not giving away too much, but with passion and fascination, drawing out discussions on maths and energy and crisis and engineering.