“You have to make the picture first,” said the “other her” somewhere in her head, and Tweety brightened, not feeling quite so lonesome. She had to make the picture first. That was how it was done. So, she wiggled her forehead and thought about it, and tried, but with no success.

“I guess I’ll have to do it for you again,” Lydia said, and she projected a mental image of Tweety, so that Tweety could see for herself what her body was supposed to be doing. Tweety saw herself get up and walk into the house, so she got up and followed the image; booted feet against the crisp snow. The sun went beneath some clouds and Tweety stopped, astonished. Where had the brightness gone? Why was the air darker? And colder? And she’d lost a mitten. The snow had changed too. Now it was all dark blue or worse, like upside-down clouds on a thunder day.

She shivered. The dark part of the air felt prickly, as if it had tiny prickers in it from air-bushes she couldn’t see. She thrust her pudgy hand out and started giggling; the air stung like the cat’s tongue did sometimes when it licked her fingers.

Oh, God, Lydia thought, how incredibly rich Tweety’s world was! How much sense data had she explored in the five minutes or so that they’d been in the yard? Bianka never left Tweety out over fifteen minutes at the most, and always watched from the window, a fact Lydia kept in mind, but Tweety usually forgot in the brilliance of present experience. Lydia wanted to cry with nostalgia, and joy too: Feeling it all from Tweety’s viewpoint was still shockingly immediate, while she herself had almost forgotten the first explorations of … well, life and creaturehood.

A part of Lydia’s consciousness stayed with Tweety, and a part dissociated and looked down on Tweety as the child plodded through the snow. Lydia knew the house was only a few feet away, yet through the child’s experience, it seemed much more distant. And that seventeenth-century landscape, Lydia thought: It was so dear, so lost in time, yet never lost, of course, because it was somehow or other, a different Now … Tweety’s Now … ever opening up to her senses. What difference, if this was all past from a twentieth-century viewpoint? She had to learn to readjust her thinking, because obviously all time existed at once. No matter how much there might be that she didn’t understand; how heroic, how forever meaningful and unique was that one child’s wonder in the moment of its Now.

Then why did she want to cry?