Usually, he spent at least a little time each day crouched behind the grainsacks and being bigger and older, firing cooly and accurately into charging companies of burly, thick-lipped UES soldiers, or going over on one wing and whistling down on a flight of TT-34's that scattered like frightened ducks before the fiery sleet of his wing rockets.
But today was different, today there was something he wanted to try.
He stood up on his toes and searched. He felt the touch of Miss Cowan's mind, no different from that of anyone else—flat, unsystematic.
He sighed. Perhaps, somewhere, there was someone else like himself. For a moment, the fright of loneliness invaded him, but then faded. He took a last look at the farm, then moved away from the open door, letting his mind slip into another way of thinking.
His chubby features twisted into a scowl of concentration as he visualized reality. The scowl became a deeper grimace as he negated that reality, step by step, and substituted another.
F is for Phildee.
O is for Out.
R is for Reimann.
T is for Topology.
H is for heartsick hunger.
Abruptly, the Reimann fold became a concrete visualization. As though printed clearly in and around the air, which was simultaneously both around him and not around him, which existed/not existed in spacetime, he saw the sideslip diagram.
He twisted.
Spring had come to Riya's world; spring and the thousand sounds of it. The melted snow in the mountaintops ran down in traceries of leaping water, and the spring-crests raced along the creeks into the rivers. The riverbank grasses sprang into life; the plains turned green again.