In the next moment, all of the whole shuddered in perfect simultaneity, all in a great whale-breath.

All things — the blackness, the nothing, the consciousness, and the groaning peels of organic clay. These soft rivulets pounded waves forward, in great, cataclysmic blotches. And there among them, a nucleus stretched and its atoms screamed — it displaced itself after the waves and spun, before the claymilk...