But the Cataclysts...the fear was resolving itself now, beginning to flower, its first dim shades of backbrain unease taking on emotional substance now, uncoiling through his consciousness like a drop of ink streaming into a glass of water...He would see to his emotions later when the fugue was over; now he was struggling to shut his eyes...focus was lost, dim tear-blur over frozen performers; his eyelids were dropping with nightmare sluggishness, nerve impulses confused by the racing fugue-consciousness...The Cataclysts, though...They took it all as an enormous joke, enjoyed hiding in the Republic disguised as plebes and farmers, the huge panorama interior of the cylindrical world as weird to them as a trace dose of their favorite drug, PDKL-95...The Cataclyst mind-set fed on correspondences and poetic justice, a trip to the human past in the Neotenic Republic the inverse of an ice assassination, with its one-way ticket to the future...