As we get older we skew more toward the past. Stencil had thus become partially lost to the street and the yardbird across it. The ill-starred year in Florence - Demivolt having popped up again - now came back to him, each unpleasant detail quivering brightly in the dark room of his spy's memory. He hoped devoutly that Demivolt's appearance was merely chance; and not a signal for the reactivation of the same chaotic and Situational forces at work in Florence twenty years ago.

For Fairing's prediction of massacre, and its attendant politics, had all the earmarks of a Situation-in-the-process-of-becoming. He had changed none of his ideas on The Situation. Had even written an article, pseudonymous, and sent it to Punch: "The Situation as an N-Dimensional Mishmash." It was rejected.

"Short of examining the entire history of each individual participating;" Stencil wrote, "short of anatomizing each soul, what hope has anyone of understanding a Situation? It may be that the civil servants of the future will not be accredited unless they first receive a degree in brain surgery."

He indeed was visited by dreams in which he had shrunk to submicroscopic size and entered a brain, strolling in through some forehead's pore and into the cul-de-sac of a sweat gland. Struggling out of a jungle of capillaries there he would finally reach bone; down then through the skull, dura mater, arachnoid, pia mater to the fissure-floored sea of cerebrospinal fluid. And there he would float before final assault on the gray hemispheres: the soul.

Nodes of Ranvier, sheath of Schwann, vein of Galen; tiny Stencil wandered all night long among the silent, immense lightning bursts of nerve-impulses crossing a synapse; the waving dendrites, the nerve-autobahns chaining away to God knew where in receding clusters of end-bulbs. A stranger in this landscape, it never occurred to him to ask whose brain he was in. Perhaps his own.