He had been of chaotic and heretical inclinations. Many of his projects came to nothing. She had watched him chase ideas. And during the months they had spent together, the one that she had seen him worry at with the greatest tenacity was the investigation of what he called crisis energy. It was theoretical physics and thaumaturgy of astonishing complexity. But what she had taken from Isaac’s frantic, off-color explanations was his conviction that underlying the facticity of the world, in all its seeming fastness, was an instability, a crisis pushing things to change from the tensions within them.

She had always found it an idea that accorded with her own instincts. She drew obscure comfort from the sense that things, even while as they were, were always in crisis, always pulled to become their opposite.

In the possibility mining that Uther Doul had just described Bellis saw a radical undermining of crisis theory. Crisis, Isaac had once told her, was manifest in the tendency of the real to become what it was not. If what was and what was not were allowed to coexist, the very tension-the crisis at the center of existence-must dissipate. Where was that crisis energy in the real becoming what it was not, if what it was not was right there alongside what it was?

That was nothing but a vague, pluralist reality. Bellis disliked the notion, intensely. She even felt, bizarrely, some kind of weird residual loyalty to Isaac pushing her to disapprove of it.

"When I first came here," Doul went on, "I was very tired. Tired of making decisions. I wanted to be loyal. I wanted a wage. I’d learnt and sought and found whatever I’d wanted. I had my sword, I had knowledge, I’d seen places… I wanted to rest. To be a henchman, a paid soldier.

"But the Lovers, when they saw my sword, and the books I brought with me, they were… fascinated.

"Especially the Lover.

"They were fascinated by what I could tell them. By what I’d learnt.

"In a few places in Bas-Lag," he said, "possibility machines still remain. There are different kinds, to do different things. I’ve studied them all.

"You’ve seen one of them: the perhapsadian, the instrument in my room. It was used to play possibilities. In an aether rich in potentiality, a virtuoso could once play particular facts and nighs into existence-choose certain outcomes. Quite useless now, of course. It’s old and broken-and anyway, we’re not in a possibility seam.