Meshner exists in a disordered inner landscape, uncertain of his identity and unable to stop because something is pursuing him. His memories have become external places rather than stable parts of himself, and he flees through them sometimes as a human and sometimes as a Portiid-like eight-legged form.

The first memory is his mother’s home on Kern’s World, inside the human Reservation where people unable or unwilling to accept Portiids lived apart. Meshner remembers his mother’s anti-Portiid paranoia, his childhood shame over her beliefs, and the ridicule he suffered because of her. This memory also reveals that Meshner’s later interest in transferring Portiid Understandings to human minds began partly from wanting to help people like his mother, and partly from a child’s envy of how Portiid hatchlings inherited knowledge.

As Meshner runs from his mother, Meshner realizes the pursuer is not truly her but something using his guilt, shame, and old pain as a mask. The memory decays around him, and a presence pushes in with the words, “We’re going on an adventure.” Meshner breaks out into another mental space before the pursuing consciousness can catch him.

Meshner next finds himself inside one of Fabian’s inherited Understandings: an old Portiid memory of a male being hunted by females as part of a cruel aristocratic custom. The same alien Other follows him through that memory too, dismantling each refuge. Meshner flees through more moments of humiliation and dread, including fears from his own career and Fabian’s experiences of social subordination.

When Meshner is almost overtaken, a childhood memory of noticing a bee breaks the pattern. The pursuing tide suddenly disperses, and Meshner emerges into a wet alien landscape that belongs to neither him nor Fabian. In this unfamiliar memory, amid strange sea-smelling life, a woman assembles herself from imperfectly remembered anatomy and introduces herself by saying that her name is Lante. Before Meshner can respond, a hand seizes Meshner’s wrist and drags him away again.