He turned to his right. Walked two, three, four strides until he felt the side of the boat against his shins. Then he threw himself overboard.
The water was cold, the shock of it slapped him into wakefulness. He opened his eyes to see the weeds around him like a swaying thicket, its tangle LIFE with fish, most of them no larger than those he'd swallowed whole on the shore. Cursing his consciousness, he looked up towards the surface, and as he did so heard Phoebe again, calling him.
"Joe-?" she said, her voice no longer despairing, but light; almost excited.
He caught hold of the knotted weed around him, so as not to float to the surface. "I'm here," he thought. "Can you hear me?"
There was no answer at first, and he feared her call had been the remnants of their previous contact. But no. She spoke again, softly.
"I can hear you." It was as though her voice was in the very water around him. The syllables seemed to caress his face.
"Stay where you are," she said.
"I'm not going anywhere," he replied. It seemed he had no need of breath; or rather that the waters were supplying him with air through his skin. He felt no ache in his chest; no panic. Simply exhilaration. He turned himself around in the water, parting the strands of weed to look for her. The fish had no fear of him. they darted around his face, and brushed against his back and belly; they played between his legs. And then, out of the tangle to his right, a form he knew. Not Phoebe, but a Zehrapushu, a spirit pilot, its golden gaze fixed upon him. He gave up turning a moment, in order to let it see him properly. It scooted around him once, clockwise, then reversed its direction and did the same again, always coming to a perfect hovering halt in front of his face.
It knew him. He was certain of it. The way its huge eye tilted in its socket, scanning his face; the way it came close enough to brush his cheek with its tentacles, fearlessly; the way it flirted with his fingers, as though encouraging them to caress it: all were signs of familiarity. And if this was not the same 'shu he'd cradled on the shore (and how many billion to one was that chance?) then he had to assume that for all Noah's misrepresentations, he'd been telling th ' e truth on the subject of 'shu. they had not many minds, but one, and this individual knew him because it had seen him through its brother or sister's eyes.
Suddenly, it darted away. He watched it go, weaving through the thicket of weeds, and as it disappeared from sight, the tangle around him convulsed, and he heard Phoebe say his name again, not remotely this time, but almost like a whisper in his ear. He turned his head to the left, and There he was, just a few feet from her, floating in the forested water, looking at her. Even now, she wasn't sure how she'd got here. One moment she'd been lost in a mist, hearing Joe's voice but unable to reach him; the next she'd been naked and tumbling down the bank of Unger's Creek. The creek was running high and fast, and in the grip of its water she was carried away. She'd been vaguely aware that this was her mind's prosaic creation; its way of supplying pictures to accompany the journey her spirit was taking. But even as she'd grasped that slippery notion, the landscape had receded around her, the sky overhead becoming vast and strange, and Unger's Creek had disappeared, delivering her into far deeper waters.
Down she went, down, down into the dream-sea. And though she felt its currents caress her and saw its shoals part like shimmering veils to let her pass, and so knew she wasn't imagining this, she didn't fear that she'd drown. The laws that bound her body in the world she'd left had no authority here. She moved with exquisite case, passing over a landscape whose mysteries she could not begin to fathom, the most puzzling of which lay waiting for her at the end of the journey in the person of the man she'd last seen hobbling out of a door in Everville.
"It's really you," she said, opening her arms to him.
He swam to meet her, his voice in her head, the way it had been from the beginning of this strange journey. "Yes," he said, "it's really me," and held her tight.
"You said you were on a ship."
He directed her gaze up towards the dark shadow overhead. "That's it," he said.
"Can I go with you?" she asked him, knowing as she spoke what the answer would be. "You're dreaming this," he said. "When you wake up-"
"I'll be back in bed?"
"Yes.
She took fiercer hold of him. "Then I won't wake up," she said, "I'll stay with you until you wake up too."
"It's not as easy as that," he said. "I have a journey I have to take."
"Where to?"
"I don't know."
"Then why are you taking it? Why not just tell me where you're sleeping and I'll go find you?"
"I'm not sleeping, Phoebe."
"What do you mean?"
"This is me." He touched her face. "The real me. You're dreaming but I'm not. I'm here, mind and body."
She started to draw away from him, distressed. "That's not true," she said.
"It is. I walked through a door, and I was in another world."
"What door?" she demanded to know.
"On the mountain," he said.
Her face grew slack. She stared past him into the swaying fronds. "Then it's true," she said. "Quiddity's real."
"How do you know that name?"
"A woman I met... " Phoebe said, her tone and expression distracted.
"What woman?"
"Tesla... Tesia Bombeck. She's downstairs right now. i Lnought she was crazy@'
"Whoever she is," Joe said, "she isn't crazy. Things are weirder than either of us ever guessed, Phoebe."
She put her hands on his face, "I want to be with you," she said. "You are.
"No. Really be with you."
"I'm going to come back," Joe said, "sooner or later." He kissed her face. "Things are going to be all right."
"Tell me about the door, Joe," she said.
Instead, he kissed her again, and again, and now she opened her mouth to let his tongue between her lips, still speaking her thoughts at him.
"The door, Joe-"
"Don't go near it," he said, pressing his face against hers. "Just be here with me now. Be close with me. Oh God, Phoebe, I love you." He kissed her cheek and eyes, running his fingers up through her hair.
"I love you too," she said. "And I want us to be together more than anything. More than anything, Joe."
"We will be. We will be," he said. "I can't live without you, baby. I told you, didn't I?"
"Keep telling me. I need to know."
"I'll do better than tell you." He ran his hands down her shoulders, and round to touch her breasts. "Beautiful," he murmured. His left hand lingered there while his fight slid on down over her belly, between her legs. She raised her knees little. He ran his fingers back and forth over her sex.
She sighed, and leaned forward to kiss him. "I want to stay here," she said. "I want to sleep forever and just stay here with you."
He slid down her body now, kissing her along the way, her neck, her breasts, her belly, until he had his lips where his fingers had been, his tongue darting between. She opened her legs a little wider, and he took the signal of her abandon, pressing his palms against her knees to spread her still wider and burying his face in her groin.
The weeds seemed to sense the passion in their midst, and were excited by it. Their sinuous stems stroked her body with an eagerness all of their own, their silky pods nuzzling her. Four or five of them dallied around her face, like suitors awaiting an invitation to her mouth, while others ran up her spine and down between the cleft of her buttocks.
She started to let out little gasps of bliss, and reached out to left and fight of her to take handfuls of the weed. It responded to her attentions instantly, wrapping lengths of itself around her wrists and elbows to anchor her, and swaying against her body with fresh abandon, its strands, soft though they were, falling on her naked back like gentle whips, rousing her dreamed skin, her spirit skin, to new heights of sensation.