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they could physically enter their own mind.
     
     
Except somehow my son and I had done that. We had become thoughts. I had almost dispersed in psiberspace, my mind spreading like ripples in a pond. Coming back to this universe was difficult. I was doing it now, wave by partial wave, but a void existed where I should have sensed my son. Taquinil. Taquinil Selei.
     
     
He was gone.
     
     
    * * *
The treeman left me to brood, alone in the cavity, caught tight by the roots. Or maybe he left me die. I had no intention of doing either.
     
     
I practiced shifting reality.
     
     
First I relaxed my mind. Drifted. I became an infinite sum of partial waves. Spherical harmonics. Why I had fragmented into spherical harmonics instead of some other functions, I had no idea, but it had a certain poetry. Harmonics of thought.
     
     
I focused on a purpose: leave. Could I enter psiberspace and come out in a new place? In math, if you took a function from one "space" to another and then changed its shape, it would also have a new shape when you took it back to the first space. Engineers did it all the time with Fourier transforms, going from a space where time varied to one where energy varied. For Selei transforms, spacetime defined the first "space" and thoughts defined the second. If I went into psiberspace, altered my thoughts, and came back, it ought to change my position and time here.
     
     
Closing my eyes, I tried to fade. Except it wouldn't work. After all the shifting in and out of this universe that had bedeviled me, now I couldn't do it. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought Kyle space had vanished, imploded like a contracting universe collapsing at the end of time.
     
     
Pah. Psiberspace couldn't implode. I thought of the Fourier analogy. If time existed, so did energy. You couldn't have one without the other. The same held true for Kyle space; as long as people could think, it existed.
     
     
But that didn't mean we could reach it. We accessed it through the psiberweb, a network of specialized computers. In Kyle space, a thought could exist everywhere, like a peaked wave. Similar thoughts peaked close together; dissimilar thoughts peaked far apart. As soon as a telop, a telepathic operator, transmitted a thought, it existed throughout the web. Other telops could immediately pick it up whether they were in the next building or across the galaxy. The web gave us instantaneous communication— and so provided the glue that held together interstellar civilization.
     
     
If I were a telop, that could explain my military bodyguards. True telepaths were rare; the strongest of us were less common than one in a trillion. You needed telops to use the psiberweb, and the web offered immense strategic advantage to whoever controlled it, so the military recruited many of us.
     
     
Had the war torn apart the web? No wonder I had so little control in Kyle space. I needed a new web node. But making such a node required extensive technological support, none of which I had here.
     
     
I clasped my bound hands and leaned my head against my knuckles. My arms ached from being in the same position for so long. But I couldn't let myself become disheartened. Surely if I concentrated enough, I could affect some change in psiberspace. I probably couldn't do much, which meant I wouldn't alter my position here more than a small amount. Nor would I have much control. It was a risk, but it was better than waiting for whatever the treeman intended.
     
     
A scraping noise broke the quiet. I opened my eyes. Across the cavity, two legs sheathed in boots showed in the entrance. Red light bathed them, the fast changing luminance of either dawn or sunset. The treeman crouched down and ducked through the opening. He carried a cord strung with giant beetles, one iridescent green, one brilliant red, and one vivid blue.
     
     
He glanced at me, then looked away as if to avert danger. Settling by the fire pit, he laid down his dead beetles.