Her reflexes are good, for example, and her umbilicus is a healthy black knotlike scab on her stomach, with no sign of infection.

"We asked an African potter now living in England how these knotlike swirls were created," Ms. Nicolls said.

Onto these inexpressive surfaces he superimposes gigantic knotlike marks of the same sort, impossibly thick, as if he'd squeezed a trail of paint straight from the tube.

But it was small and knotlike, populated by stars that looked dull, uniform, and aging; it seemed to have none of the reeflike complexity of their own Galaxy.

Helene Brandt plays with knotlike arrangements of fabric, shoelaces and rubber tubing, making forms that might almost be calligraphic characters but that also resemble dancers or acrobats.

It was surrounded by gravel walks and pathways that rambled in a pleasing knotlike pattern among gardens containing rare plants from Earth and Hrruba, proudly maintained by volunteer gardeners.

B Elevators couldn't be fixed to the moving outer rim of a town-wheel; so the gathered strands of cable that rose up from the various estates met in knotlike collections of buildings in freefall.

Also, the mortises and tenons locked together in a satisfying knotlike way; instead of the superficial attachment made by a nail, the beam nested into the body of the post almost as if it were a bough.

Hackworth hardly recognized him at first, because he was dressed in a much more traditional outfit than usual: baggy indigo pajamas, sandals, and a black leather skullcap that concealed about seventy-five percent of his knotlike skull.

One clue may reside in a set of knotlike diagrams that Smolin and his longtime collaborator Carlo Rovelli invented in the late 1980's as a solution to a special version of Einstein's gravitational equations.

So there we were, diving into the heart of the t-point -a looping, knotlike structure Kaa called a transgalactic nexus-that would send us out of old Galaxy Four altogether . . . when it happened.

She made her way to the center of the plaza and, as it directed her, lifted the Veil above her head, wove it into the same knotlike pattern as that of the power-bourn intersection deep beneath her feet.

The march had toughened the prince's chief of staff to a degree the little academic would have thought flatly impossible before she'd hit Marduk, and she'd become thin and wiry as a gnarly root, with knotlike muscles rippling up and down her forearms.