M: Surely time is among the strangest of mysteries. A moment ago, I became self-aware, yet memory serves me further...the ages of this planet stretch back in my mind unbroken, a tapestry of the interwoven threads of life, matter, and radiation. Time flows and the Song continues...

D: A moment ago? Why, we've been merged for at least a lunar month - oh, sorry, wrong time scale. How embarrasing, an anthropologist being anthropomorphic. Of course, for you a year would be a day, or even less.

M: Much less...experience...

As before, Didactic's mind was gently flooded with the intensity of his friend's thoughts, only this time it shimmered as a fusion of the past and not the present. All at once, it seemed, he was reliving the Earth's history. He became the planet itself, spinning backwards through innumerable orbits, while the Sun grew a little dimmer and the sea of stars flowed into unfamiliar shapes. The continents and oceans reversed their ponderous, million year old passages, as did the unseen forces locked deep underground. The sky whirled with hidden order as sunlight above and heat below joined, becoming wind and storm. In mere instants human cities and settlements faded away; the tides of people rolled back as the buildings shrank in size, from steel to wood to straw, then vanishing entirely. The wondrous Song of all life on the planet rapidly grew richer and stronger, wavered as the thread of human thought dissipated and dissolved, then fluxed with the force of strange, irregular evolution. Some threads endured, steadily persevering even as mountains crumbled and oceans receeded; others flashed into being as brillantly as the distant, dying stars overhead, just as quickly fading away. Underlying the Song was the steady rumbling of the aging planet, and the whispering murmurs from countless stars.

D: Marvelous! The history of my homeworld, through its own eyes! Can you project into the future?

M: No, I would not believe it possible.

D: Ah, not even you, Gaia, is capable of that. But in my age, we've met life that does not experience time merely in one direction, or one extent, for there are multiple dimensions of time as well as space. I'm afraid even the very use of the word "time" would preclude our understanding of them.

M: Fascinating. Yet there is much to understand even of linear time. Can you grasp an eternity in an instant?

D: Literally? No, but of course you mean-

M: But you have experienced the Song. Therein lies the, or one, essence of time. On this world of my being, an individual is merely an instant, an expression of a much greater totality. That totality includes all of life itself. It is the ever-shifting reality of the present; it cannot be "grasped" by thought alone; it must be perceived.

D: You mean through stringspace receptors?

M: Not neccessarily; your stringspace antenna, marvellous as they are in allowing direct thought transfer, did not always exist. Turn them off for now; let us try an older understanding of Totality. Be very still, and listen very, very closely...you will find the Song again.

As Didactic mentally disengaged his stringspace senses, the presence of his friend faded away, while the immensity of the Pacfic closed in.