He walked away from the structure at the same pace he had arrived at it, the day-equivalent light steady around him, the Middle Domain's landscape resuming its familiar self-luminous character as the structure's impossible photon-light faded behind him into the general ambient quality of everything else.
Xu Ling walked beside him.
They did not speak immediately. The silence between them was the productive kind, both of them processing what the structure had contained and what the contact had produced, the time required for that processing not artificially shortened by filling it with words that were not yet ready.
He thought about the sphere's question.
What are you building toward, and does the building know what it is building toward.
