Fortunately, yet undiscovered metaphysical laws prevent the giant moa spirits from affecting the world of the living.
To his frustration, however, Squawk-Click could not so much as draw the gaze of the creature from the Water Not To Drink. It carried on, indifferent to Squawk-Click’s hostility.
Squawk-Click and Mate, apparently unable to do anything but think and feel, tried every variety of thought and feeling they could muster. Squawk-Click tried imagining the creature dying of starvation and thirst; Mate tried to convey pure pain. Together they tried feeling the hurt of having left the young behind, recalling the fear of their last moments in their bodies, and the gamut of every sensation they had ever perceived, but still the creature paid them no heed.
Squawk-Click felt Mate’s desperation growing. Squawk-Click had a thought that he had never had before: that, just as young change into grown males and females, he and Mate had changed from a grown male and female into something else entirely. Something he had never seen, something that could not be seen, something he could never have known was there.
In the same way, the creature from the Water Not To Drink could not know that he and Mate were there. Even Squawk-Click and Mate did not really know where “there” was, and, in accepting this, Squawk-Click understood another new thought: though he could see and hear the creature, he was not where the creature was.
Many such new ideas started to form in Squawk-Click’s mind. Mate, too, could feel this expansion; it was as if, without their bodies, their comprehension could expand and envelop new things, like a pair of raindrops falling from the back of a leaf and into the vastness of the Water Not To Drink.
