“I feel strange,” says Drinker, and starts to blur.

Bariad drops his marsh grass and swishes his tail. “Whoa, quantum,” he says. “Do you need my backbrain? I can try to stabilize you–”

“Brontosaurs,” Drinker whispers. His eyes are bright with the future. “They call us brontosaurs and then th h hey say we don’t ex ex is ist”

He pulls apart. Impossibility rips out from him, a wave; the herd begins to split. Bariad is thirty tons of panic. He batters at the wall of time with all his minds, and runs, and rams free, out–

Into a different book.