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was blue, the water around her was blue, and she was a small brown dot floating in the middle of a vast
lake capped by a cloudless sky. Despite the clarity of the sky, puffs of fog rolled across the surface of the
lake and a thin gray strip separated one edge of blue water from the rim of the sky.
Before she could decide whether to swim toward the grayness or not, something rammed into her legs
and she backpaddled away from the whirlpool. Mike's body bobbed to the surface. She should have
known he would follow her. It had not escaped her notice that ever since she was a little girl, he had been
there trying to keep her out of trouble. Perhaps now that Lobsang Taring was too old to be guardian of
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the Terton, Mike had unwittingly donned the role as a hereditary one? Nevertheless, now was the time to
guard her guardian or he'd drown.
She plunged her arm back into the whirlpool, struggling to grab him and draw him out without pulling
herself back in.
She hadn't even noticed him following, absorbed as she was in her protective meditation and the
onslaught of her recognition of those higher pieces of her personality. But she felt a lightness in her mind,
a bubble of relief-similar to what she'd felt at leaving Kalapa-to see that he had come, that she would
have a companion after all. She fished for him more deeply and finally grabbed him by the hair and
tugged.
Ordinarily, even his comparatively heavy body would be buoyed up by the water and she would have
been able to tow him, but he was still in the whirlpool. Its force held his feet although it seemed to be
content to spit him to the surface and spin him there. He lay within it, facedown, hair floating,clothing
stuck to him like scum. His limp, outstretched hands were bluish.
She reached for his shoulder, but fog much thicker than Chime had ever seen before bloomed between
her face and Mike's body, and her thrusting hand slid over him and missed its grip. She grabbed again,
touching his sleeked hair and running her hand down his head and neck until she was able to take him
under the shoulder with her other hand, and this time she pulled him toward her, toward the sapphire
brilliance of the sky and the lake.
But as the whirlpool released its prey and Mike's body bumped against hers like a floating log, the fog
attached spiderweblike tendrils to him and began to wrap him in its folds.
The day after Mike had saved her, as he supposed, from sleepwalking into the lake when she was little
more than a baby, he gave her a swimming lesson and showed her how even someone as small as she
was could tow a body as large as his to the shore of the lake and resuscitate it.
Now his karma had come full circle as she used the lesson he had given her to try to save him, towing
him and his private cloud with her toward the gray strip between sky and lake that she hoped was land
and not a storm. Despite the blueness of the sky, she could not see the mountains.
The underground river had been flowing downward before they popped up into thelake, and since they
had come down from the mountains, they should now be able to look up into them, unless they had
traveled much farther than she believed possible.
But then, she reflected, the world would be very changed now. Who knew if the mountains beyond her
home even stood as mountains any longer?
Mike's body suddenly heaved in her arms and his hands flew to her neck and pushed her under the
water.
"Don't ruin anything," a voice from within the fog said. "I don't want to wake up crippled."
Mike vaguely remembered trying to breathe and choking on water, being sucked up into the bottom of
the blue vortex. The next thing he knew, he was up above, looking down at his body floating in the
whirlpool. Could he bedead? Was that possible? He hadn't breathedthat much water.
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Then he saw Chime Cincinnati grabbing for him, wrestling his inert body onto its back and hooking her
elbow under his chin in the position he had taught her, then flipping over onto her back.
Good! Now she had only to haul him to shore and pump the water from his lungs so he could use them
again, and he'd be able to climb back into his body. He wasn't sure how he had come to leave it to begin
with, but now, looking down on himself, he could somehow seeinside himself, and it didn't seem to him
that his lungs were all that full. Watching Chime's struggle to hold onto him, he decided that he could
probably re-merge with his physical self right now without too much harm and maybe rouse his body
enough to help her.
He huffed himself up and dove toward his body, but he bounced right off again as the body heaved
upward and its hands grasped Chime around the throat and pushed her under.
The sight of his own hands choking Chime whenhe wanted to save her made him feel dizzy with
disorientation.
"Don't ruin anything. I don't want my new body to be mute or crippled," a woman's voice said.
A piece of fog steamed toward the flailing forms of his body and Chime. The fog coalesced into the
agitated shape of a pale young woman wearing white shorts and a sleeveless top.
She was speaking to Mike's body as it drowned Chime, and she hovered just over Chime's gasping
mouth, bloodless hands steepled in a diving position, as if she was about to plunge down Chime's throat.
Mike had read about astral beings, and figured that this woman was one and that for the time being so
was he. And if she could maneuver her astral self, so could he.
He steepled his hands, as she had, and dived toward the flailing bodies, wrapping protectively around
Chime.At least now that he no longer had a body, he didn't have to worry about drowning, he thought,
when his body pulled Chime's under the water, and with it pulled his own . . . astral form, he supposed it
was, for want of a better term.
All around him shadowy fish-shaped forms swam in and out of the shadowy leafy forms swaying up
from the bottom of the lake with the movement of the water. Something as large as the dining hall in
Kalapa darkened the water behind him, cutting his body, Chime, himself, and the cloud-woman off from
the whirlpool.
"Let go of her. You're killing her!" Mike said to the person staring out of his own eyes. His eyes looked
back at him, startled.
The cloud-woman said, "Don't listen to him, Richie. He's just the spook who used to have your body. I
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