The mylar balloons without logos and without strings — they're spores
extruded from the silver mines. You thought they were tapped out, those
old mines — but now and again in the dead of night, out come the mylar-
balloon-like things, queuing at the dark maw of the entrance, probing out
their silver snouts dull in the night, reflecting only the moon and
stars, moon and stars swimming in the flock of mylarites bumping and
jostling across the saltflats in the blue black darkness, headed for the
lights of LA and Vegas.

They're searching for the mudflats, for the swampy areas, where the still
stagnant water ripples under the moon, where schools of malarial gnats
gestate underwater, hanging from flexible sucking tubes — the spores
will sink into the mud, bury themselves like lungfish, like flatfish,
like mudtoads, like horseshoe crabs, like skates, then burrow deep and
grow brand new veins of ore, of silver and gold and pyrite, copper and
onyx and chalcedony, quartz and diamond and antlers and veal, veins of
veal veiled underneath the heavy curtains of soil.