This was the least satisfying KSR I’ve read to date. It is a short mood piece, a series of related dreams perhaps about a man lost on a planet that is all water except for a rock spine girdling the planet, on which various strange groups of villagers live and hunt and kill. The man and a woman, “the swimmer,” have fantastic experiences, often grim; they may be stranded space travelers who’ve lost their memories. I would have preferred storytelling to style, but there is style aplenty: “Inside him the flesh metronome went tick, tick. Life slipped away hadron by hadron, limning every joy with a rime of grief, and he walked backward into the future, waving and crying out “Good-bye! Good-bye! Good-bye!” I did like that the swimmer and the man apparently spoke languages overlapping almost completely, except that what meant “loyalty” to the man meant “stubborness” to the woman, “arbitrary” was “beautiful,” “actually” was “currently,” and “I love you” was “I will leave you.”