Sparks of various and extraordinary colours sputtered from connections.

A massive arc of power suddenly snapped Andrej’s body absolutely rigid. An unstable corona briefly surrounded him. His face was glazed with astonishment and pain.

Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek watched him, paralysed.

As the batteries sent great gobs of charged particles racing through the intricate circuit, flows of power and processed orders interacted in complex feedback loops, an infinitely fast drama unravelling on a femtoscopic scale.

The communicator helmet began its task, sucking up the exudations of Andrej’s mind and amplifying them in a stream of thaumaturgons and waveforms. They raced at the speed of light through the circuitry and headed towards the inverted funnel that would blare them silently into the æther.

But they were diverted.

They were processed, read, mathematized by the ordered drumming of tiny valves and switches.

An infinitely small moment later, two more streams of energy burst into the circuitry. First came the emissions from the Weaver, streaming through the helmet it wore. A tiny fraction of a second later, the current from the Construct Council came sparking through the rough cable from the Griss Twist dump, slamming up and down through the streets, through the circuit-valves in a great slew of power and into the circuitry through Andrej’s helmet.

Isaac had seen how the slake-moths slavered and rolled their tongues indiscriminately across the Weaver’s body. He had seen how they had been giddy, but not sated.

The Weaver’s whole body emanated mental waves, he had realized, but they were not like those of other sentient races. The slake-moths lapped eagerly, and drew taste . . . but no sustenance.

The Weaver thought in a continuous, incomprehensible, rolling stream of awareness. There were no layers to the Weaver’s mind, there was no ego to control the lower functions, no animal cortex to keep the mind grounded. For the Weaver, there were no dreams at night, no hidden messages from the secret corners of the mind, no mental clearout of accrued garbage bespeaking an orderly consciousness. For the Weaver, dreams and consciousness were one. The Weaver dreamed of being conscious and its consciousness was its dream, in an endless unfathomable stew of image and desire and cognition and emotion.

For the slake-moths, it was like the froth on effervescent liquor. It was intoxicating and delightful, but without organizing principle, without substratum. Without substance. These were not dreams that could sustain them.

The extraordinary squall and gust of the Weaver’s consciousness blew down the wires into the sophisticated engines.

Just behind it came the particle torrent from the Construct Council’s brain.

In extreme contrast to the anarchic viral flurry that had spawned it, the Construct Council thought with chill exactitude. Concepts were reduced to a multiplicity of on-off switches, a soulless solipsism that processed information without the complication of arcane desires or passion. A will to existence and aggrandizement, shorn of all psychology, a mind contemplative and infinitely, incidentally cruel.