Because now I understood the arrangement of each module before I had enough reflections to logically deduce it. It was akin to solving a Wheel of Fortune puzzle with only a few letters showing and guessing it right every time. I could look at a nine-letter word starting with A and ending with N, and know right away the answer was “abduction”, which shouldn’t be possible. Technically, it could be antimycin, addiction, afternoon, agitation, animation, antivenin, apportion, adulation, adoration, accordion, amphibian, ascension, accretion. So how did I know the module spelled “abduction” with only two of the patterns in place? There was no explanation beyond my drug-enhanced intuition, and what is the explanation for the intuition itself? Maybe it’s just another type of undiscovered matter.

I had a feel for what I was building, and with each new piece the picture became clearer, allowing me to purposefully call up reflections I’d never seen on the dredge lid, but knew to exist somewhere down the cord.

Speedily, I layered afterimages of stacked pairs upon new reflections that appeared, taking mental snapshots of the resulting modules and then fitting them to subsequent groupings. Like memorizing words to form a sentence, then sentences to form a paragraph, and paragraphs to form a page; my mind had reached the limit of visual recall.94 I looked upon the page I had built, just before it dissolved, and finally understood what I was seeing.

Blueprints.

The blank reflections I’d been ignoring were the data.

The reflections weren’t coming from Mr Bugs or Mr Watches – this was genuine content from Mystery Contestant Number Three, the one who held the secret of the Chime’s location and the key to resurrecting the Bloom of God. And here they were, handing over the map. Sort of.

I refocused and dove back in, creating modules from fragments to build pages – so to speak – of a larger thing. Soon I had two pages, and then three.95 Then one page would fade away, forgotten. The process was a lot like playing Simon, actually, except instead of having to remember sequences of colors and tones, I was remembering shapes and orientations. I built more, working to outpace what my memory dumped.

Soon I had enough to construct entire sections into discrete segments, or chunks of the build, and hold them in my expanded short-term memory.

All of those late nights playing Simon with Patton had trained me for this very moment. Though, in fairness, I think the space-drugs helped.

Back in the enclosure it was nectar time. A rush of blood spread across my chest and head in anticipation, and I could actually feel my eyes dilating.

Tired from a long day of trying to restore the Bloom of God to its rightful owners, I rolled over and reached for the tube. Patton was there too, laying on his side, right where I’d left him that “morning” with Pickles.

His eyes were slivers. “Ben?” he mumbled.