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Sebastian saw the cat coming, but not clearly. An undulating image cloud floated slowly along a tracer string of fuzzy still frames that wound across the floor and sprouted up onto the counter. The whole thing was in flux, fading at the far end and coalescing from nothing on its approach. Definitely a cat, but more like a wet painting of one smeared across the canvass. Sebastian glanced around and saw the same was true for all animate objects - the fly buzzing back behind the counter, and two people conversing in reverberating echoes across it. The living world pulsed and throbbed.

The far end of the tracer string evaporated and the cloud collapsed into a cat, sitting on its haunches before him on the dirty Formica counter top. It seemed to freeze time with its stark stillness.

"You'll have to let go of it - your mortal way of seeing."

Sebastian swiveled his gaze back and forth but saw no speaker. The two people at the other end of the counter were the only ones in the trailer, and the words were not theirs. He wondered now if he had really heard them at all. The cat statue fixed him with a penetrating gaze.

"Consider this. Humans can only remember the past and imagine the future, but they never actually see them. If it were otherwise, their peculiar,ordered way of thinking would fall apart. So they have evolved the ability to see the universe through a pinhole in time. For them, a dimensionless present cleanly separates the past from the future, with absolutely no overlap."

Sebastian cocked his head, then shook it vigorously.

"You're drifting - please try to focus. It is a cruel paradox, the ability to see only a now, but a now which is imaginary and dimensionless. Yet, those poor souls are confined to it for all of their lives. It is not that way for us. Here the past and future mingle like watercolors on wet rag paper. Here you'll find there is no need for memories of a past, and no reason to hope or plan for a future."

The soundless words formed in the back of his head, inside the skull, but not very deep. They formed not as thought form, but more like a senseless perception, a sudden awareness of an idea that originates from an outside source and gains entry to the conscious mind by means other than sight or sound. A real thought came now, and it was not at all like the cat's telepathic message. This one barreled down on him like an approaching tractor-trailer, thundered past with a Doppler shift in pitch, and disappeared onto a distant horizon line. The thought

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