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of the Messiah, Norton Jaybush himself—moved down the line, pausing in front of each communicant just long enough to touch him or her on the forehead.
    Every one of the kneeling figures at least jerked at the touch, and many pitched over in violent fits. Rivas still remembered very clearly his own first receiving of the sacrament—remembered watching the jaybush work his way down the line toward him, and wondering how much of the gaffed-fish response was just hysteria or outright faking; and then the jaybush had come to him , and touched his forehead, and the rending physical shock of it had blacked him out, leaving him to wake up on the floor, dazed and bruised and stupefied, half an hour later.
    In the dream, when the jaybush came to Urania and touched her, she had raspingly exhaled a cloud of pink vapor, and then had steadily kept on exhaling more of it, long after her lungs should have been wrung completely empty, and when Rivas rushed up in concern and took her in his arms he could feel her flesh diminishing inside her clothes like an outgoing tide; for a long time he cradled the still impossibly exhaling and ever-lighter girl, and when the emptying finally stopped and he raised his head from her shoulder and looked down into her face, it was nothing more than a naked skull that gaped blindly up at him.
    And, he recalled now with something like nausea, that discovery had not in any way altered his determination to bring her back to Ellay and make her his wife. He rubbed his eyes and pushed a stray lock of hair back into place.
    “Ah,” the old woman said, nodding and pacing back and forth with the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. “Neutrons, you say? Goddamn. And… master cylinders ? Lord have mercy.” She squinted down her nose at Rivas to see if he was properly impressed by these esoteric terms. He noticed that she hadn’t bothered to connect the end of the telephone cord to anything, and it was dragging around on the floor behind her. He wondered whether she’d trip over it. “Ten-four,” she said finally, and then put the telephone down on the window sill, apparently to cool off.
    She turned to her guests. “Well, the spirits had a lot to say. You, sir,” she said, pointing at Rivas, “are the focus of a lot of uncertainty. You see, in every equation there’s an unknown factor—the hex, as we mathematicians say—and in order to untangle the various lifelines involved and see which one comes out healthy at the end, it’s necessary to…”
    She went into a long speech then, full of “identity resonances” and “orbital velocities of the soul,” frequently waving toward her dust-covered and obviously random collection of shabby books to support her statements. Presently she dug out a deck of playing cards and, while shuffling them, explained that Matt Sandoval, Ellay’s legendary First Ace, had designed the fifty-two cards on his deathbed as a means for mystically savvy people to be able to consult him even after his demise. The four “aces,” she informed her guests, were called that because they represented the four natures of the Ace himself; She then began laying the cards out on a tabletop in a significant-looking pattern, scowling or nodding as each card was added.
    Rivas stopped paying attention. During the last several years he had laboriously learned to read the old-time writing, with all its silent letters, superfluous tenses and fabulous, credulity-straining words; and he’d actually read a number of the books and magazines that were just decorations in the more affluent households, and props for fortunetellers. And though he had arrived at no very clear understanding of the bright, crowded, “electrical” world of more than a century ago—even their maps described a southern California coastline that didn’t exist—he’d gleaned enough to know that most people who made their livings by claiming to know about the ancient wonders actually knew less about them than he