Heights of the Depths by Peter David Page A

it as well as she knows the shape and feel of her own body. She is having a memory that is not hers, cannot be hers. It is impossible, and yet it is more real than she herself.
    Jepp has never seen a city such as this one before. She is walking through it slowly, and the streets are deserted, but the buildings, gods, the buildings are beyond description. They tower so high that it seems their uppermost pinnacles must assuredly be caressing the very sky.
    She is naked as she walks down the street. Her nudity does not bother her. It never has in the past, and the unreality of her surroundings only add to the surreal aspects of the experience. Although she wants to think that this place in which she finds herself cannot possibly be real, she nevertheless comes to the realization—even in her dream—that she does not possess this level of imagination. She could not possibly have fabricated this on her own. She was never clever enough by half to conceive of buildings so tall, especially when common sense would seem to indicate that…once a building gets above a certain height…it would most assuredly have to topple over. Structures such as this should not be able to exist. It was physically impossible.
    Wasn’t it?
    But because of her lack of imagination, how could she have come up with this when left to her own devices?
    Then she hears a distant rumbling. It is not coming from the skies, though, as an oncoming storm might prompt. Nor is it originating from the streets around her, as would result from an oncoming army.
    It is coming from below the street. Tunnels, perhaps, such as Trulls built, along which high speed cars called Trullers ran. But the sounds being generated are much louder, suggesting that whatever is causing them is proportionately bigger. What, Jepp wonders, could be so big as to cause such noises?
    Hot air is blowing up from below, and she sees large rectangular entranceways into the ground. She has seen hard ground like this, not grass or dirt but instead some sort of gray material that is incredibly solid. “Paved” is the word that now comes into her mind, and “sidewalk,” but she has not heard these words before and so does not comprehend how they could be coming to her now. They are things left over from humans, from that race of which Jepp is a part, but about which she knows little and understands less.
    There is movement from the entranceways. It is a human. One. He is dressed head to toe in blue cloth with a scrap of fabric hanging from around his throat, pointing downward like an arrow toward his loins. Perhaps it is symbolic, to remind others that he is a man and has a man’s equipment. Or perhaps he is simply addle minded and could not find his equipment unless he had an article of clothing that reminded him of where it is situated.
    Then another man emerges, dressed in different colors but in the same general sort of attire, also with a loin pointer. And then more, some dressed similarly, some not, and now women as well, wearing far more clothing than Jepp has ever seen any female human wearing. It seems, oddly, both constraining and yet liberating.
    None of them are moving at normal speeds. Instead everyone is moving very quickly, so much so that it is becoming nothing but a steady blur. She can no longer distinguish one from the other. She cannot determine if she is moving slower or they are moving faster, or whether time has any meaning at all anymore. All she knows is that there are human beings, hundreds of them, thousands of them, perhaps millions. They are coming up from below, and all around her, moving past her in a steady stream of humanity that causes her eyes to well up with tears.
    And other objects are moving past her now. They are vehicles that remind her a little of the jumpcar driven by the Bottom Feeders. But again the number of them is staggering, coming in all colors and varieties and moving far more quickly than the clunky jumpcar could ever hope to go. Jepp remains