sound formed trembling notes that hung in the air, almost
visible, crystalline and somehow painfully dissonant.

Like Songeen, her world or the pathway to it was strange, alien, but
poignantly beautiful.

It was stranger than he thought.

He realized almost at once that his mind was making adjustments. It was
lying to him, translating unfamiliar concepts into terms known to
memory. It was diluting and enfeebling his sensations. But dread grew in
him.

When his mind tired, stopped lying to him, what would it really be like?
Could he stand the factual perception?

They trod the forest aisles of crystalline forms. There was light, of
odd, gray, glary kind. A twilight, silvery, unreal as the trans-Lunar
dreams of drugged poets. Songeen moved ahead slowly, making no effort to
regain her clasp of his hand. Almost she seemed to avoid him, waiting
until he almost overtook her, then skimming lightly away from him. Her
slim, pale witchery was both taunt and challenge. She appeared to float
rather than walk.

One by one she dropped her clinging robes. She became part of the mad
forest, part of its dreamy gray enchantments.

Light grew steadily, and with it came more color, more magic, and more
confusion of senses. The forest-forms assumed strange geometries. They
stretched about him in endless vistas, blurring and transmuting as he
watched. The dream-like cloudiness was fading from his perceptions. He
caught dreadful hints now and then of new, unheard-of forms and colors,
of unstable geometries as far beyond Einstein's as his were beyond
Euclid's. Nothing was tangible or definite, and perhaps that was the
secret. Nothing ever is. Fear wove a crystalline web about Newlin's
throat, strangling.

He halted and took stock. Ahead, Songeen waited, watching him, her
figure a pale, elfin flame form against the shadowy mass of colored
crystals. It was a forest of gemfires, and she was the purest jewel of
the forest. Naked, alien, but--

* * * * *

Why had he come here? His mind balked at backtracking. There was no
going back. Perhaps he had already come too far. Was Songeen a vampire
luring him into the hideous depths of this unknown place? He had been
here before. It was like that awful illusion in the tower, but muted.
How much did he perceive? How much was sheerest self-deception? Was he
mad in the midst of awful sanity, or sane in the ultimate horror of
lunacy?

Her voice floated back to him