“Who are you?” he asked.
“Do not speak aloud. I can hear you. I am within you and without. I have no name.”
“Then what are you?” He said it aloud, without thinking.
“An instrument of The Brightly Shining.”
He dropped the trousers he’d been holding. He sat down carefully on the edge of the bunk, leaned over and groped around for them.
His mind groped, too. Groped for he knew not what. Finally he found a question—the question. He didn’t ask it aloud this time; he thought it, concentrated on it as he straightened out his trousers and thrust his legs in them.
“ Am I mad? ”
The answer—No—came clear and sharp as a spoken word, but had it been spoken? Or was it a sound that was only in his mind?
He found his shoes and pulled them on his feet. As he fumbled the laces into some sort of knots, he thought, “Who—what—is The Brightly Shining?”
“The Brightly Shining is that which is Earth. It is the intelligence of our planet. It is one of three intelligences in the solar system, one of many in the universe. Earth is one; it is called The Brightly Shining.”