Glenn Tropile squinted about him like a mollusc peering out of its shell. There was another fact, the oddness of the seeing. What makes it look so queer, he asked himself.
He found an answer, but it required some time to take it in. He was seeing in a strange perspective. One looks out of two eyes. Close one eye and the world is flat. Open it again and there is a stereoscopic double; the saliencies of the picture leap forward, the background retreats.
So with the lights on the board—no, not exactly; but something like that, he thought. It was as though—he squinted and strained—well, as though he had never really seen before. As though for all his life he had had only one eye, and now he had strangely been given two.
His visual perception of the board was total. He could see all of it at once. It had no "front" or "back." It was in the round. The natural thinking of it was without orientation. He engulfed and comprehended it as a unit. It had no secrets of shadow or silhouette.
I think, Tropile mouthed slowly to himself, that I'm going crazy.
But that was no explanation, either. Mere insanity didn't account for what he saw.
Then, he asked himself, was he in a state that was beyond Nirvana? He remembered, with an odd flash of guilt, that he had been Meditating, watching the stages of boiling water. All right, perhaps he had been Translated. But what was this, then? Were the Meditators wrong in teaching that Nirvana was the end—and yet righter than the Wolves, who dismissed Meditation as a phenomenon wholly inside the skull and refused to discuss Translation at all?
That was a question for which he could find nothing approaching an answer. He turned away from it and looked at his hands.
He could see them, too, in the round, he noted. He could see every wrinkle and pore in all sixteen of them....
Sixteen hands!