The unadorned Subdee world was an endless, dry desert, with the parched yellow ground blending into clouds of dust in the middle distance. The disk of a bloated red sun was faintly visible through the ochre sky. Innumerable fat plants were scattered across the dry plain, mobile succulents with snaky, hungry roots like writhing tentacles. The subbie plant-creatures ranged from being waist-high to taller than Thuy. Each of them had two or three meaty leaves, like “living rocks” or lithops plants. All of the subbie-plants bore thorny structures that could tear a person’s flesh.

Two of the subbies kept pulling their roots out of the ground, inching to the left, inching to the right, then burying their roots again. They were the dancer subbies who’d played at being jackal-women. The four subbies who’d resembled bird-headed men were plants as well, but they bore hydrogen bladders that allowed them to hang in the air. Fretfully they circled Thuy, whipping their roots in the air.

As for the oversized lithops who’d presented himself as a sacred scarab, he still looked a bit like a beetle, with two fat leaves stuck together for a body, and roots for legs and feelers. A hollow, sharp-tipped feeder root jutted from his front end, framed by rigid growths. The feeder root looked entirely capable of draining Thuy’s blood.

Although the harp’s insistent buzz had driven back the subbies, the sound was fading now. So once again the subbies closed in. Thuy kicked at the ground, wondering how to break back through the Planck frontier. The sandy soil was translucent, as if made of glass beads, with slowly swirling streaks that betokened the seething of the quantum foam. Thuy kicked harder, then bent down and butted the dirt with her head. But it wasn’t opening up for her.

A sharp pain pierced her calf; the beetle plant had ripped a gash. A hovering bird-man plant shot a vicious feeder tube past her. Thuy felt the tingle of root hairs puncturing her skull, and once again a phantom Egyptian temple began to form. Meanwhile, the dancer plants had swathed the harp with writhing skeins of roots; the hairy tendrils were eating away the uncanny painting that adorned the soundbox. Perhaps it had been by the Hibrane Hieronymus Bosch?

Desperately, Thuy began flailing the harp strings. The sound came out as a series of sour warbles. Again the Egyptian scenery faded away, but on every side the persistent subbies were menacing Thuy with their spiked feeder tubes.

Thuy mustered all the magic she knew: she thought of Wheenk, Chu’s Knot, and her love for Jayjay. She reached out for psychic contact with the harp; she plucked and strummed the strings, steeling herself against the creepy tingling, piling note upon note, playing her hopes and fears and pain. The sounds beat against each other; the very fabric of space began to shake.