between the airborne Chums and the earth-bound masses complicate the issue by introducing elements of vertical spatial

relations to the already complex scene. This brief episode thus clearly suggests that the interaction of the natural and the artificial is complexly connected, in Against the Day, with questions of a spatial and spiritual nature. Against the Day s numerous physicists, mystics, explorers, anarchists, and capitalists are all concerned with the properties and values of space, making space and place a bridge between its spiritual and ecological dimensions. As a result, territories, dimensions, and movement are tested from a variety of perspectives, each of which offers its own advantages and dangers. Often human interactions with natural space awaken a planetary consciousness, one rarely interested in preserving those who disturb it. Likewise, as the book progresses, characters discover or explore a number of places that offer refuge to those who work against Earth s enemies. The novel s treatments of space suggest, broadly speaking, two avenues for exploring the ecological relationship between space and spirituality. One, reminiscent of LeClair s work on Gravity s Rainbow, inquires into the nature of the consciousness lurking in the earth, a consciousness ready to retaliate against those who encroach upon its sacred spaces and to embrace its allies. Another is embodied in the novel s hidden realms, alternate Earths, and sacred and magical territories. Taken together, these concerns offer a description of a living earth that responds actively to the movement of human characters through its space, suggesting that this Earth can provide at least temporary relief to those aligned with it against its enemies. Both elements of the ecological theme are foregrounded, and their interdependenc e suggested, during the episode describing the Vormance Expedition. For these explorers, the landscape is ice, and the voices of the ice entered their dreams, dictated what they would see, what would happen to each dreaming eye as, helpless, it gazed. Just to the north loomed a far-spreading glacier, the only one in this entire domain of ice that had never been named, as if in fearful acknowledgment of its ancient nobility, its seemingly conscious pursuit of a project (129). Nature, here, has intention and voice; the landscape is alive. What it consciously pursues, however, is unclear. Despite this uncertainty, the unnamed glacier s proximity to the fabled Ginnungagap causes trepidation in the explorers, for that gap is the chasm of ice-chaos from which arose [. . .] the Earth, and, given the Northmen s more generic Gap, it is also a wideopen human mouth, mortal, crying, screaming, calling out, calling back (128). The intentional consciousness hidden in the folds of the glacier is interwoven with our telling of our own mythic origins, which call to us just as duties to history and blood do (127). The gap is dangerous in