Sentence The Fourhundredandseventyfirst

But, as he slept, little Levy Balquihidder's dreams took him back to a time before history, even before he had first been born on Earth; long, long before Earth itself, before the Universe, when all was a formless void with neither Time nor Space to worry about: here were assembled a multitude of Spirits, disembodied, jostling for space, in imperfect amity, just thoughts without substance, communications without words: to an observer they might have seemed like shifting lights, like the Aurora Borealis, but there could be no observers here, for there was no-one to observe or to be observed; these were ideas, synapses in the cosmic broth, waiting for the moment they all anticipated, longed-for and dreaded: and when it came it was terrible! a swift compression of all that had never been and could never be again and then a bang so soundless and so bright that the universe was, for a

brief moment, that pure white which contains all the colours of the spectrum, bonded together into one instant and one infinitesimal moment: and then the Universe unravelled as drops of molten energy were hurled in all directions and there was almost an audible murmur from those soundless spirits as the clock raced forward, gathering momentum as the drops coalesced and drew together in family groups and extended networks, ever-rapidly-changing patterns which scattered the light and churned the atoms of a billion prisms, looking like the drops of dew on a morning spider's-web – if there had been even one single eye to see them, but spiders lay in the far-off distant future, because Time was running now – and then it all seemed to come together: suns beginning to glow and each

drawing smaller lumps of rock into orbits around them; oh they knew that aeons had passed in what seemed to them like a flash, for they had no sense of time, an alien concept to shapeless, formless spirits, who never grew any older, who were like thoughts in the vast mind which had conjured up this firework display, and then they sensed a change, that the time was approaching when their roles would change, when their purpose would become clear, when they would become as one with whatever drama they would enter, on whatever stage their play would unfold, and the spirit who is now little Levy Balquhidder sensed, rather than felt a wind on his face, a rush of blood in his ears and knew that it was his turn to cry out, and he found that he had a voice and he screamed and was aware of being picked up and held in two arms and found himself suckling and he did it all instinctively, improvising without the need for any direction and he opened his eyes and looked into a kindly, wrinkled face – he knew instantly that this was his first mother, inhabited by an earlier spirit, and he

held tight onto her furry coat with hands and feet as she swung herself up into the trees and began a journey, with his foot on the first rung and the future laddering away above him, that he is still on, millennia later, though the passage of time is still something he is trying to get used to; as is the accumulation of memory and he wonders if he will ever experience overload? for he has never met another spirit, which is to say, that although every Human Bean (as he thinks of the body he inhabits) is flesh, mind and spirit, with the spirit providing the mind, he is the only one, so far as he has been able to ascertain, through tentative and ambiguous questions, who remembers everything, and he senses that most spirits are wiped clean of all residual memory at the body's death and before their next re-birth, which he feels sad about, and also makes him feel lonely, because he is unable to share this knowledge, this back-catalogue of learning and experience, for on the one occasion he tried, he was denounced as a devil and was stoned to death, so he has learned to be circumspect: after all, nothing lasts for ever except the Spirit, and in his time-scale, as well as his new Bean, he is young, and he is particularly happy at having been born as little Levy Balquhidder and is confident of an enjoyable life ahead of himself even though, despite his rear-view mirror on the past, he has no forward insight, just a sense that this new life will be better than his last, and that he may, somehow, be exonerated and, oh how he longs for sharp teeth with which to Fletcherise, biting and chewing being such an exquisite pleasure for one conceived with no need for food, or any other bodily requirement!