Her friends were kind. They showed her what to do with her body. They took her below, showed her the galaxy underground. These were things no one else like her had ever seen, they said. Her little legs couldn’t keep up so they carried her on their backs through the earth, through the stones and water and sky. They showed her cities, dead and buried for a million years, and suns that preyed on weaker suns in the deepest places. When they wanted to explain something complex to her, they took her tiny body in their jaws and folded their mouths over her like a blanket, and within their hums and whistles she understood their meanings on the insides of her bones. Later, their saliva drying on her skin, she would be wracked with tremors, as new nuances of concept emerged and trembled.
          On special days they went to church. In a breathtaking spire, which hung suspended above a dizzying gulf of nauseous white slime smeared over an infinite black, they all reverenced a little black stone, which gleamed in her eyes no matter where she looked. There were others there too, friends of curious shapes. Curiouser and curiouser, said one of her friends, one of the old ones. And may there be more forms, and stranger, laughed another. They were amused by her naivete, they were highly educated, they knew the philosophies and literature of men and women, and despised them. The curious shapes approached, touching her in hunger on and in her body but her friends were kind, for the most part. This was her education.
          The trap, they said with their slobbering mouths, drops of words raining on her hair, or maybe they said restriction, or snare, was of two parts: to feed only on the unalive, and only on the forms of others. The friends of an older nature were content with this but their young philosophers, their activists, were inclined toward a different morality. From out of the shining many-sided rock they had absorbed the vision of a new order of things, one perhaps insalubrious (she felt a sourness in the slobber of the word, which sprayed out from between their multi-angled teeth) to the conventional way of things, which after all was rooted in these old cities of the earth which she had witnessed (but the cities were long dead, the young ones always reminded).
          One lens of the eye, they told her (this was their catechism), to evaluate the form; one lens to focus on the dead; the final lens the lens of life—but this was the most ravenous part of the eye, as the young philosophers ever reminded them, this part that sees is also the part that eats, the mouth of the eye, the one that has not yet been sated the way He intended. Such were their theological debates.
          She sat at their feet during their councils, like a pet, indulged, and arguments occurred and the dead were duly consumed and for a very long time the case remained unchanged, until one day in the dull passage of their services she stood erect, her knees ripping from the sticky carpet, her eyes full of hope and understanding, and in a voice of power and of surprising beauty (she had not whispered a word in a thousand years), she spoke to them a new evangel, one of rapture and revel, a new birth of freedom, as she characterized it in the vernacular of her people—which grand syncretic idea she is drooling now to the rhapsodic herd drawing around her on the carpet, which idea she has synthesized from the motion of the heavens and the spit on her skin and of course from the grace of Him Above and Below, and which heralds the glorious day of new ambition.
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