Such guessing, visioning, dim perscrutation of the momentous future: the very clothmakers, old women, all townsfolk speak of it

Is he off his meds or something? He's acting crazy.

Year after year the fleets of mat-sailed prahus left the islands in the Arafura Sea - the loveliest tropical scenery I know - and gracefully and quietly, as is their wont, floated with the monsoon to those wild and uncivilizied shores, bartering with the aboriginals for beche-de-mer, tortoise-shell, and the natural products of the jungle.

All those days of grinding it out on the road, all those highway bumps and the hours in that vibrating cab had mismolded his body, compacting his organs down along his waist and padding that cargo with sedentary fat, so that he'd taken on the appearnace of a pear with legs.