“This is our pragmatic Proteus?” he asked.

“See,” Cyprus said to Oversoul Seven. “Each of your personalities interpreted your experience with the aspects of the tile in their own way. Lydia used it to feel her own identity in the midst of ‘shifting time’; Ma-ah and Josef used it emotionally too, perceiving to some extent the many aspects of their own subjective reality; and Proteus is letting it open his mind to new possibilities—”

But Oversoul Seven was staring at the symbol that was indisputably now set in the tile. He turned to watch Proteus and Window as they walked away, and then shook his fourteen-year-old-type head: “Proteus is right. That symbol shouldn’t be there; at least Proteus shouldn’t be able to see it. When I traveled to Ma-ah’s time, the sign wasn’t there in the tile in her courtyard. It’s her signature, the sign that she scribbled just now in the tile—defiantly—when she got angry at Sumpter—”

“Exactly,” Cyprus said.

“Exactly what?” Seven cried excitedly. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve told you before that everything happens at once.”

“Yes, but—”

“And that time is open-ended—”

“Yes, but—” Oversoul Seven felt on the verge of a great discovery, but he couldn’t quite get it. His predicament was so obvious (and to Cyprus, amusing) that she started laughing.

“Stop it,” Seven said. “I’m distracted enough. Let’s see. Everything happens at once, so while I had my experience with the tiles and how they exist in ‘time’ … then each of my personalities did the same thing, but in their own way. I understand that much. In Earth terms, my experience rippled out in all directions—”

“An excellent analogy,” Cyprus said.

“Yes, but … new things happened. I see what Lydia did or tried to do…. She went back in time and realized that the past and present are happening at once, so she tried to change the present by changing the past. But there’s a big difference between that and the other thing that happened. Ma-ah signed the tile, but Proteus saw it in his present where it hadn’t been a few minutes earlier. And it wasn’t there in my earlier either—”

“Of course. Go on,” Cyprus said.

“Go on? I can’t. That’s where I get lost,” Seven said dejectedly. “There’s something that’s escaping me.”

“There certainly is,” Cyprus said, smiling. She kept changing from a man’s form to a woman’s so swiftly that Seven said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but couldn’t you stop doing that just for now?”

“It’s supposed to remind you of something,” Cyprus said. “But you’re too involved with this particular problem right now to pay any attention,” and she steadied down to the woman’s form that she used as a matter of convention.