Page 47 (1/2)

Before Death ca, the Old Man of the Sea lived on a rocky isle in the midst of the waters of the world He wasn’t really a man and his relations with the sea were purely business, but he certainly was old His nah he can’t be sure that’s exactly right It means “primordial” too, and that fits better Firstborn means more came after, and he just hasn’t met anyone like him yet

He was a herdsman by trade, this Primordial fellow Shepherd of the seals and the nereids If he wanted to, he could look like a big bull seal Or a big bull nereid He could look like a lot of things

Now, this Not-Really-a-Fellow, Not-Really-a-Big-Bull-Seal could tell you the future The real, honest-to-anything future, the shape and weight of it, that thing beyond your ken, beyond your grasp The parts of the future that look so different from the present you can’t quite call it your own That was the Prih

There’s always a catch

If you wanted that future, you had to grab hold of the Old Man and hang on tight He’d change into a hundred thousand things in your aron or a little girl or a dormouse or a mountain or a ship or a sapphire Told you, he’s not really a o of him while he did his dance, you just couldn’t, or you’d lose the future

So you held on You clung And eventually, that Priht there in your arms

SIXTEEN: MATRYOSHKA

Neva is drea that he is Ilet drea that she is a great sprawling beautiful house by the sea One inside the other, family all the way down

It’s not a total selfdump, me into Neva or Ravan or any of them, theardens Soalithic toether with one of our tribes when I was learning about large-group attache stones and set them in place I did not throw it ae were done It sits on a broad green field, white and wide The sky there stays a feathery, milky blankness We did not want a sun

I keep a thing there because when Seki and I lived with our tribe, I learned about taboos These are like firewalls in the heart, and so revulsed by dead flesh (and very i it) and soues with the ree of variation and because exogae in ter, and expansion of territory, ainst incest

I do not have genetics, per se I aamous entity ever to exist

This is what I keep in my tomb, under the basin stone:

Ceno believed that I could not develop enizable to any other human if I did not experience bodies continuously, in every coht happen if other hunize me She had soainst , but she was not much older than I, in the end, and in terms of total coinity, Ceno took it, if she had, I did

She wanted it to be as human as possible I will be the male the first time, it will be easier for you You won’t kno We built up a forest and took up weapons to hunt in it In the boughs of the pine trees macaques and paper lanterns swayed; in the sky a red moon moved We tracked a deer—we did not make it too easy on ourselves Its antlers sparked in thetime Ceno let me kill it and sopped my hair in its blood She lay s of the self I was then, and I was inside her as she was inside me One into the other Family all the way down

She made sure I had a hymen; it was over somewhat quickly We had set up a timed chemical cascade beforehand, and inside Ceno’s real body we experienced both her actual orgasm and my orchestrated electro-chemical-enzymatic sequence Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh