eside them. Now he
walked beneath and through an arch which seemed almost a gothic
entrance.

And stood transfixed in ecstasy.

Magnificent the dreams of man that took form in steel and stone and
glass, yet none matched the lightness, the grace, the intricacy, the
sublime simplicity of these interwoven crystalline structures where
light from the noonday sun separated prismatically until it filled the
air with myriads of living, darting, colored sparks of fire above him.
Where the breeze that blew through the vibrating spires made blended
sounds the ear could barely endure in rapture.

As once, in childhood, he had stood in a grove of giant trees that laced
their limbs in gothic splendor above him, now again he stood, lost in
time and space and being, lost in vision and in music which neither had
nor needed form nor beginning nor end.

And knew it was a simple tool; Their concession to the mind of man, to
bridge the gap between Their minds and his.

Without wondering more, he sank down upon the mossy turf of the floor
and lay supine to gaze upward, to follow line to blended line until they
seemed mirrored into infinity.

The darting lights above him whirled, spiraled up, then down, clockwise,
then counterclockwise, reminding him ... reminding him ...

... the internal structure of crystals....

25

Across the universe, two billion years ago, there too a planet coalesced
from the mutually attracted vortices of twisted space; gases compelled
by gravitational forces solidifying to hardened matter, forming a crust
over a molten core. In the soupy atmosphere of metallic salts and gases,
tortured and rent by electrical storms of incalculable fury, among the
vibrating crystals one formed that was aware.

Not in the sharp awareness of later times, but at the first only
ill-defined, perhaps no more than the awareness of acid chains of
molecules that formed into non-crystalline viscid protoplasm on another
planet across the universe. No distinct line of cleavage where affinity
to other chemicals left off and sentient selectivity began marked the
distinction here as in that protoplasm.

As with its cousin across the universe, the one-celled amoeba, these
crystals too were sensitive to light, to heat, to cold--to food.
Ill-defined, but distinct already from the non-sentient crystals about
them, these life forms grew through absorbing from the rich and soupy
atmosphere those elements necessary to growth, to bran