Jayjay had been too tense and rushed to teep the harp before. But now—now he could feel the harp’s mind. She was a higher order of being, incalculably old and strange. She knew the Lost Chord. She was ready to teach it to him. He’d only needed to ask.

Jayjay and Thuy melted into their climax; they kissed and cuddled.

And then Jayjay got up naked and fingered the harp’s strings. They didn’t hurt his fingers one bit.

The soft notes layered upon each other like sheets of water on a beach with breaking waves. Guided by the harp, Jayjay plinked in a few additions, thus and so. And, yes, there it was, the Lost Chord. Space twitched like a sprouting seed.

“Sorry!” It was Azaroth, pushing his head and shoulders into the bedroom. He was in a state of panic. “Oh, what did you do to the harp’s painting, Thuy? It’s all scraped off! Gladax is gonna kill me.” He wrapped his big hands around the vibrating instrument. “I’m worried I waited too long!”

“Don’t go!” shouted Jayjay. “The harp’s just now beginning to work!”

“Hope so,” said Azaroth. “But I’ve got to try and get home.” And with that, he and the harp were gone.

No matter. The sound of the Lost Chord continued unabated, building on itself like a chain reaction, vibrating the space around them. Jayjay smiled at Thuy. He had a sense of endlessly opening vistas.

“You did it,” said Thuy. “You’re wonderful.” She wasn’t talking out loud. Her warm voice was inside his head. True telepathy. Jayjay had unrolled the eighth dimension. He and Thuy had saved the world.

Thanks to the universally accessible eighth-dimensional point at infinity, anyone could see anything now. Omnividence, telepathy, and endless memory were the natural birthrights of every being on the globe.

And this applied to objects, too. The alchemical addition of lazy eight memory to nature’s gnarl was enough to make everything aware. The air and the trees, the flames, brooks, and veins of stone—all became conscious.

The ancients had viewed nature as inhabited by spirits: sylphs and dryads, salamanders, undines and gnomes. And now the myths were true. Earth and everything in her were alive.

The ubiquitous natural minds would become known as silps. Some were like genii loci or “spirits of place,” residing in cataracts and pools, in tangled glens and groves, in wind-scoured cliffs. Silps arose in less exalted locales as well: in human hairs, in scraps of paper pinwheeling down city streets, in drapes and clothes, in elementary particles, in fumes.