My Library

passing through strange flashes of percepts, into a brilliant sun and out the other side, dodging around clusters of forms who seemed startled at their percept of us. All the time I hung on to BB’s ident much as the last skater in a crack-the-whip, in and out of clouds, bands of energy that were like gusts of hot and cold air, electrical shocks, straight through the walls of a magnificently spired city. I was afraid I couldn’t hang on to his ident much longer, afraid if I let go I’d be thoroughly lost. He stopped suddenly and we were back again in the thin haze of outer earth environ. I was shaking. BB vibrated brightly. (Good fun, huh?) I flickered deeply. (Yeah, good fun. Who invented that one?) BB blanked. (Invented?) (How did it get started?) BB plied. (Oh, I don’t know. Always been around. You can begin a complete new one if you want. The fun of the game is to add to the old something new inside, in the middle, or on the end, sort of a surprise. Get it? (Yeah. We humans have something like it called follow-the-leader.) BB lighted. (That’s right, follow-the-leader! You did real well at it. You must play the game a lot.) I flickered. (Not, uh, not recently. But I did fly airplanes and that helped.) BB blanked, and I went on. (Incidentally, what happens if you miss a turn, or lose the ident?) BB rolled strongly. (You lose!) (What happens to the losers?) BB flickered. (I don’t have any rote on that. They never come around to play again. My percept is, they get lost.) (And stay lost?) (Well, they never come around to play again, as I indicated, so I don’t have a rote on it. Often we have as many as a hundred playing in a group. Nice game, huh?) (Yeah.) I then had one final query. (What is all that stuff we went through?) BB plied. (Don’t have a rote on that either. Nobody bothers with that