“I don’t like the way you said that,” Seven answered, worried. “And there’s one thing I want to know. How long has this conversation between us been going on? Before I came in on it, I mean?”

She just looked at him. For a brief instant the handsome man of indeterminate age and the beautiful woman of indeterminate age materialized again and merged, stabilized, focused until it was so vivid and brilliant that Seven could hardly bear it.

“Don’t you know? Don’t you know?” The musical voice seemed to come from everywhere, from inside Oversoul Seven, and outside him, from the clouds and the jet. The words seemed to echo through time as he knew it and didn’t know it, until he felt that Lydia and Proteus and Josef and Ma-ah were all singing, and asking the question all at once.

The phenomenon vanished so quickly and completely that Seven almost lost the balance of his consciousness. “What was that?” he gasped. “What happened?”

“Every once in a while you ask a really important question,” Cyprus said. “Or rather, the question that you actually ask has a really important one hidden inside of it. Then you get an answer.”

“But now I’ve forgotten what the question was, much less what was hidden inside it,” Seven cried. “And I don’t know what the answer meant.”

“Dear Seven,” Cyprus said, with some compassion, “You do understand. A part of you does. But before you go back, I want to give you one hint. You make your own reality, and your personalities make their own realities too.”

“But I know that,” Seven said, disappointed. “I thought you were going to give me a big hint—”

“I have,” she said. “And I suggest that you begin with Lydia this time. Remember: you make your own reality.”

Seven mused about it: you make your own reality … and instantly he lost track of the constant conversation. As Cyprus knew he would.

Chapter Ten

Lydia and Lawrence: A Trip Is Interrupted

“How’s Mr. George?” Lawrence yelled. “Okay,” Lydia called. Usually she kept Mr. George, the goldfish, in a bowl on the trailer bookcase, propped up with books so that the bowl wouldn’t fall off. Every once in a while she went to check on him to see that the water didn’t slosh out with the bumps in the road. Now she was driving. Lawrence was reading in back, and Mr. George was in the front seat beside her. Greenacre, the Angora cat, lay curled around the bowl.