Wood and her children remained in that position for perhaps twenty minutes, as long as it took for the light that had been above the home to begin glancing through the southwest windows, illuminating the dust--discarded skin--as it constellated around them, making of the stillness they were affecting an impossibility, or a hoax.

Finally, she dropped her hands to her sides, and the children, feeling the room stir, looked up at her in expectation.

"We can make the tremblen move," she said. They were silent.

Chalk, the eldest at nearly 12, took a full minute before she spoke--she knew one didn't rush the enlightened, "Move?"

"With us. The tremblen can be incorporated."

Although she trusted her mother implicitly, Chalk knew the tremblen were not to be touched. It was the first lesson any of them had learned. She knew their response to contact with the human bodies they served and who served them was to kill and be killed. Waste was the result of touch. They did not waste. And although the tremblen responded to being moved with the surplus of proprioceptive energy which fueled the world she and her sisters knew, Chalk understood them as an inert jelly--a film that could be spread across the special weave of the windfolios to gather kinesthesia and convert it. She and her mother and younger sisters were Lavenders, the ones who slowly stirred the folios in the chemical vats until the energy was stored and the folios separated from the tremblen, then recollected with sieves.

Surrounding her were Chalk, Thread, Paper, Dark, and Number. As she had raised her hands, palms up in hallelujah, so had they. As she had lowered her head and the lids of her eyes in gratitude for her vision, so had they. If there was anything the children of the tremblen knew--it was that movement was life, not to be wasted, not to be ignored.

If it had not occurred to her so late in life, it would have earlier, but then she would not have been so ready for it, so full with the misdeeds of Man. No, it was now that she understood-- that not knowing which way to turn, one turns around. This was to be the hole at the center of all her knowledge.

When, in the heart of the day, she fell to her knees and prayed to Black Johannes that it not be true, her children--the five of them who were home with her and not out in the windfields--they dropped down also, becoming her first company of apostles.