“They’re like little . . . Harper-clouds,” Ia finally offered, finding the right words for it. “Little scudding knots of I-don’t-know-whats. Or like those little optical illusions you get when you’re staring at a grid of black squares on white paper, and you see the little fuzzy gray squares at the center of every intersecting set of white lines. But you only see them with your peripheral vision because when you stare straight at them, they vanish, and all you see is a clean white crossroads in the midst of all those black city blocks—does that make any sense?”
