“Here, boy,” she said. “There are the glasses you’ll know the Snake with.”

“Glasses?” Tao said. “My vision’s fine.”

“No. It’s not.” She put them on his face.

Suddenly Tao was pulled from his body and his senses, and saw the world without her mask on. A tangle of fields and dimensions. The height of time, the width of space. And he knew then that matter was both a point, and a wave, and a joke. And he saw the logic at the bottom of everything, and the madness at the top, and the shape of becoming, and the dance of decline. And finally then he saw himself, in true perspective: A speck on a blot on a smudge on a blemish on a fleck in a grain of galactic sand amid a billion other beaches, and those beaches themselves only made up more grains of sand, and more grains of sand, and more grains of sand, and more grains of sand, and more grains of sand.

The old woman removed the glasses...