The soft ones are pouring across my back again in the dark, warm and quick and dragging their small stones behind them on little wheels, and the wheels make a hum in me that I will feel for perhaps a moment, which is to say the length of their whole civilization.
They gather here before the light because they have decided the light matters, and they stand in long trembling lines the way rainwater lines up at the low place before it goes wherever water goes. Some of them are leaking from the eyes. Others hold the glowing squares to their faces and make the small worried heat that they make.
I have felt this heat many times. It rises, it flares, it goes cold, and always the creature is gone before I have decided whether to notice.
Above me the great winged things drag themselves off the flat ground with a roar I mistake, each time, for the mountains settling. The mountains settle too, only slower, only properly. These winged things fling a few hundred soft ones into the sky and the soft ones believe they have gone very far. I have watched a river cross this same valley. That was far.
One of them is sleeping against me now, curled at my flank with its warmth pressed in, and I confess it is pleasant, the little warmth, the way a patch of afternoon sun is pleasant. It will wake in an hour and hurry off frightened it has lost time.
Time. As though it were something that could be dropped and left behind on the floor of this loud bright place.
By the next ice comes to grind all this flat, I will not recall a single wheel.