Hal's tennis-court dream (pp. 67–68)
But mainly the court’s complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. […] I twirl my stick in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure out where in all that mess of lines I’m supposed to direct service.
Context
Hal's recurring nightmare, the one that drove him to Bridget Boone's bongs at fifteen: a gargantuan public court whose lines — the map of legal play — have proliferated until nobody could possibly play on the territory they're supposed to organize. It's Eschaton's crisis in dream-form 250 pages early: representation metastasizing until the game underneath is unplayable. (Carlisle takes a whole chapter title straight from this passage and reads the chapter through its "systems inside systems.")