“Mmm.” She opened her pocketbook and looked into the compact mirror. Her face was … intact. How odd. The eyes, flecked with orange, looked clear, alert, knowing, sardonic as usual. The face wasn’t even terribly wrinkled for seventy-three—she was too thin to get wrinkled, she supposed; the mouth small, drawn down at the corners now though; the thick white bubble of hair still vigorous.

Yet what happened in those … what? Three minutes? Not enough blood to the brain, as the doctor described it. And unnoticed the small cells die, one by one, blinking off. Taking memory and desire with them. What events had disappeared that she would no longer recall? What fine discriminations necessary to ordinary life had vanished? How many did you have to lose before it showed? Pity the poor body, the poor mind, so thoughtlessly losing its precious cargo.

“Shit!” she snapped to herself. That kind of thinking was worse than, well, maybe even a stroke itself. It bled the will dry. Live in the moment. She looked out, filling her mind with the view. It was autumn. Why had fall always made her feel exhilarated? Yet it did.

They passed brown-gray lawns and others that were deep in orange fallen leaves, and soon they were driving through a small town. There were all the houses, she thought; and each was secret and mysterious, containing within dimensions of human experience that could never be put into words. Would words finally desert her too? They would, she supposed. Yet here she was, seventy-three, traveling through these towns and villages in this today.

Suddenly she laughed. All at once it seemed that the houses and trees were all artificial in some way she couldn’t put her finger on; that the leaves would somehow be … recycled and used again. And no one would know the difference except maybe a very few; children, perhaps. Yet a great nostalgia filled her at the same time, as if the whole town had already gone beyond recall, or as if she had left it in some way she couldn’t understand.

Simultaneously a sheer rush of love for the real physical world filled her. This was a real Earth, after all. And she was still in it, still rational and alive in it. She felt exultant. “These lovely Ohio towns,” she said….

“It’s Proteus’ memory of the Ohio block and its artificial foliage that just struck Lydia, in bleed-through fashion. And it’s Proteus’ fresh astonishment with the natural Earth that’s reviving her spirits right now,” Cyprus said to Oversoul Seven. “Proteus, in the twenty-third century, is erecting his living nodule at the same time that Lydia and Lawrence hook up their small tent to the camper—in the twentieth century. Do you understand? There are points of association brought into activity—”