Nebula Best Novel nominee (1975) : The Embedding
Hugo Best Short story nominee (1979) : The Very Slow Time Machine
Nebula Best Novellette nominee (1983) : Slow Birds
Hugo Best Novellette nominee (1984) : Slow Birds
British Fantasy Society Best Novel nominee (1997) : Oracle

"(Sheikh Muradi said:)... Ah, Salim, in what way is it our century? Do we own time? Do we generate time?"
"God's century it is," agreed an elder.
"He recreates the world every moment," another nodded.
"Is time 'real'? Then hand me some! Is the world-within-time real? No, reality is elsewhere. It is where Khidr moves. God sustains the illusion of the world for us. Where is your consciousness, Salim? Can you show me some of it?"
Salim scratched his head..."

"The universe was freely self-determining, for all events were thoughts; and everything contributed thus to the general maintenance of existence - every microbe, every plant, every stone. Naturally, later events must be able to cause earlier events - or else, he saw, there would be no evolution, only random combinations; nor would there be a unified space-time."

"How did one define an 'entity'? Was it a single body cell, or the whole body? Or was it the whole ecology this body was part of? Where did one draw the line? Was a stone a separate object - or the single atoms that made it up? Or the much larger rock it must have fractured from? Or the whole desert environment? When did a stone become too small to be a stone?..."

"The separating mechanism, he had already seen in his vision of the vortex. It was: point of view, observer and observed, leading inevitably to the consciousness of separate minds. The potential for separate consciousness was built into the basic subject-object, cause-effect, law-obedient nature of reality. And all these separate, 'individual' foci of awareness, the existence of all the separate entities there were, prevented the universe from realizing itself and vanishing, for as long as these existed."

"With the help of the alien drive our senses construct the reality as if we are in a higher plane of the universe, one of unbound thought, not of solid things. Our voyage occurs simultaneously. I believe, but our sense of duration, our construction of time determines the apparent rate of progress. Which is why we have to think in terms of probability of arriving rather than actual distance travelled as such. Without duration we couldn't think a thought from one moment to the next. Possibly, for beings sufficiently advanced such a journey might take no time at all..."

"(Tharliparan says:) "Death is not dead. Beyond death is Askatharli where all our acts have their prototypes. Menka is full. Menka is part of our world - the other side to it - but Menka is also all around us. Think of it, rather, as Askatharli. Because of the physical condition of our world, with one side empty, we tend to teach children, to begin with, by this simple analogy...""

""Each connects with all the others in Askatharli space," says Samti. "A hero can imagine his journey from here to there across the whole world. Wherever you are, each is at the centre of all the others.""

"(Zeraini says:) "In Askatharli space there are centres of generation - jewels within the setting of the Imagining. The law of the veil - by which the world shall see only itself, in the mirror which it is - is partly suspended in these jewel regions. So rich is the Imagining here, so bright the faces of the jewel, that wordly existence can be dual: both of the world, yet beyond it. So rich is it, that entities with no personal being of their own, which are intermediate between the Imagining and the world, may project into reality if reality calls them forth."
"Angels," murmurs Zoe."

""... There is a Veil Being. It is a quasi-life form which balances on the interface - exists on the standing wave - between reality and the creative force that is beyond reality. It is part of the "energy circuit" between what you term "God", and the created universe - in our terms, between the descent of Being into the world and its reprocessing back through death, which is psychic counterpart of the continual fluxing in and out of existence of the entire material cosmos. This part of the "energy-psyche circuit" that we call the Veil Being has achieved an independent, yet parasitical rebel existence. In Salman's terms this is a ... Satan.""

"Peter frowns. "I'd have thought the primitive mind would be more in key with Askatharli. Sky-contact - the sense of an intimate contact with the beyond; it's something from the primitive past on Earth - something which the last shamans looked back on nostalgically. It was a talent progressively lost. It was something deep in a Golden Age of the imagination which withdrew further and further..."
"Yet here the Golden Age is now," whispers Zoe. "Subsequent to the age of steel and city and machine? Does time flow backwards?"
"They aren't interested in time," I remind her. "The most important part of their lives is lived outside time, in imagination space, dream space. Time isn't... flowing. Not for them.""

"(Mulla Kermain says:) "... Consider the Descent of Being. The Imagining yearns to know itself through the medium of what it has imagined. So it descends from the realm of absolute, non-manifested light which is forever invisible to us..."
"Like the vacuum of space?"
Indeed, Salman. It descends through the veils of cherubic energies which have no individual free existence of their own, into this manifest world which contains the infinitely varied presences of God. At each level there is set a seal. Only the Imagining holds the key, or the manifest world would flow back into it immediately...""

"The gas giant is primed for life, but only a weird quasi-life occurs in a crystalline virus form - life which isn't alive yet which replicates itself by high frequency electromagnetic resonance. It is a parasitism with no host to express itself, forever poised on the threshold of life. It is an alphabet in search of a language to express itself. And because of its sheer size and interconnectedness, eventually it yearns and stirs - and captures, not life, for there is none to capture, but the interface between the universe which is imagined, recreated afresh at every moment, and the Imagining of it. It hovers on the very boundary between non-existence and existence. Its own rogue existence balances upon the ebb and tide of being: the breath of the cosmos, a breathing swifter than any human breath, swift as the quantum flip of the electron that ceases in one orbit to re-exist in the next. This quantum breath is what the Veil Being breathes."

"- A body ... which is being re-imagined from moment to moment..."

"Of course, the real power - the God-power - resides in us, who are that fruit. It lies in our quartet self. Peter's speculations about our potential immortality may well be true. We do not eat, we do not drink. This Amy-self feels no need to. We are recreating ourself afresh from moment to moment."

"We face each other in mind-space. We breathe the quantum breath of the universe as it exists and ceases and re-exists. With our God-bottle in our hand, we imagine the reality of Pilgrim here and now, existing, ceasing, re-existing."

"We four rip apart. At the same moment our 'selves' part too, opening up, unfolding... Matter is frozen energy, and lives are only frozen presences of the Imagining, crystallizing out of it. So I melt, I flow. What is this 'me'? What was it? Only an aspect, a presence, now returning.
The Veil Being is ripping, too, in a different way - ripping all over, becoming a permeable membrane once again, between the Imagining and reality. Osmosis of trapped souls resumes in a rush, so huge is the pressure against the membrane of that doomed quasi-being. A flood follows in our wake, of surprised alien egos that are also only aspects, presences; which now melt too, and flow.
Who was 'I'? For a moment, all my life is present, all at once. And who I am, is answered.
Now that knowledge flows back into...
energy, the creative energy, answering its question
into light, the light beyond light"

"(Raoul) stared blankly, hardly focusing. "How would it be," he muttered at last, "to tread the Submerged lands? Would the denizens of the Submerged perceive us as ghostly wraiths? Spooks or will o' the wisps? Vague blobs of light, occasionally solidifying into seemingly solid people? And what would they make of your projected dreams? Would these seem to be silver elves and hunking, dripping giants, and mothmen and such?"
"Do you really believe in the existence of these... counterpeople?"
"Counterfeit people?" he misunderstood me, or deliberately chose to do so. "I must be one of those myself, born into the wrong universe!"
"Surely," said I reasonably, "the Submerged is simply our mythic dimension? It's like a sort of fifth dimension of our world, Raoul. The bulk of people only notice four dimensions: length and breadth and time and height. But there's another one, as well, which you perceive - perhaps it's required as a kind of glue to join the other four together. Let its name be depth; depth is different in nature from height.""
 

"(James Joyce said:) "So: you're welcome to the omphalos, the navel of the dead time.""

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