Blake whirled, and flashed his light into the shadows. The light picked up Smith's retreating figure. "Get out of my mind!" Blake shouted. "Do you hear me? Get out of my mind!"
Laughter danced in the darkness, silence ensued. Turning back toward the window, Blake saw that Blake Past and Deirdre Yesterday were leaving the living room. He watched them come out the front door, walk around the corner of the house and start down a starlit garden path.
Forsaking Sabrina's trail, he followed them along the path, the Erinyes at his heels, and watched them sit down on a little white bench beside a rose-riotous trellis. As he watched, Blake Past broke one of the roses free and pinned it in Deirdre's cupreous hair.
Blake Present plunged away from the moment and picked up Sabrina's trail again. Why did I sit there beside her? he demanded silently of the remembered stars. Sit there beside her like her lover when the roses were in bloom? Father-protector—father-fool! I slept with her mistress, and I would have been her Naoise! Within earshot of her conched ear I lay with her black whore-mother, and when the satyr in me was replete I stepped over her thin child's body and ran away!
Behind him in the night, the Erinyes hissed and murmured to each other gloatingly.
Sabrina's trail had been erratic before. Now it became even more so. It approached this boundary and that, only to veer off in another direction. Sometimes it doubled back upon itself, and each time Blake was able to cut down on her lead. He should have been elated. Strangely, however, he was not. Instead, a feeling of uneasiness afflicted him, increasing as the distance between them shrank.
At length, after detouring around an impassable memory-image of deep space, the trail extended into what at first appeared to be a vast woodland park. It was not a park, though. It was a Dubhe 4 rubber plantation. Blake groaned. Did he have to relive this sequence too?
Apparently he did. Sabrina's footprints were deep and undeniable in the soft earth. They pointed unerringly in the remembered direction. Had she discovered that he was following her? Was she deliberately torturing him by making him back-track along a mental trail that he wanted desperately to avoid? It would certainly seem so.
He forced himself to move forward among the gray ghosts of trees. He crossed a shallow, scum-covered stream, leaping from rock to rock, and afterward climbed a hill. Hearing a loud splash behind him, he turned and looked back.