Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (Time and Perception)
Even a garden-variety wraith could move at the speed of quanta and be anywhere anytime and hear in symphonic toto the thoughts of animate men […] He says Wraiths by and large exist (putting his arms out slowly and making little quotation-mark finger-wiggles as he said exist) in a totally different Heisenbergian dimension of rate-change and time-passage. As an example, he goes on, normal animate men’s actions and motions look, to a wraith, to be occurring at about the rate a clock’s hour-hand moves, and are just about as interesting to look at.
Context
The wraith explains wraith-physics at shot Gately's bedside, and the book gets its only fully worked-out second time-scale: JOI's ghost lives at quanta-speed, from which living people move like an hour-hand — i.e., at the exact perceptual limit below which motion stops being watchable. The novel that has spent hundreds of pages on time felt too slowly (withdrawal, waiting, Abiding) here builds the inverse case: a being for whom our time barely moves at all.