A Darkness in my Soul

by Dean R. Koontz

Version 1.0

A #bw release

ONE

Divinity Destroyed...

I

For a long while, I wondered if Dragonfly was still in

the heavens and whether the Spheres of Plague still floated

in airlessness, blind eyes watchful. I wondered whether

men still looked to the stars with trepidation and whether

the skies yet bore the cancerous seed of mankind. There

was no way for me to find out, for I lived in Hell during

those days, where news of the living gained precious little

circulation.

I was a digger into minds, a head-tripper. I esped. I

found secrets, knew lies, and reported all these things for

a price. I esped. Some questions were never meant to be

answered; some parts of a man's mind were never intend-

ed for scrutiny. Yet our curiosity is, at the same time, our

greatest virtue and our most serious weakness. I had

within my mind the power to satisfy any curiosity which

tickled me. I esped; I found; I knew. And then there was

a darkness in my soul, darkness unmatched by the depths

of space that lay lightless between the galaxies, an ebony

ache without parallel.

It started with a nerve-jangling ring of the telephone, a

mundane enough beginning.

I put down the book I was reading and lifted the

receiver and said, impatiently perhaps, "Hello?"

"Simeon?" the distant voice asked. He pronounced it

correctly—Sim-ee-on.

It was Harry Kelly, sounding bedraggled and bewil-

dered, two things he never was. I recognized his voice

because it had been—in years past—the only sound of

sanity and understanding in a world of wildly gabbling

self-seekers and power-mongers. I esped out and saw him

standing in a room that was strange to me, nervously

drumming his fingers on the top of a simulated oak desk.

The desk was studded with a complex panel of controls,

three telephones, and three-dimensional television screens

for monitoring interoffice activity—the work space of

someone of more than a little importance.

"What is it, Harry?"

"Sim, I have another job for you. If you want it, that is.

You don't have to take it if you're already wrapped up in

something private."

He had long ago given up his legal practice to act as my

agent, and he could be counted on for at least one call a

week like this. Yet there was a hollow anxiety in his tone

which made me uncomfortable. I could have touched

deeper into his mind, stirred through the pudding of his

thoughts and discovered the trouble. But he was the one

person in the world I would not esp for purely personal

reasons. He had earned his sanctity, and he would never

have to worry about losing it.

"Why so nervous? What kind of job?"

"Plenty of money," he said. "Look, Sim, I know how

much you hate these tawdry little government contracts. If

you take this job, you're not going to need money for a

long while. You won't have to go around snooping

through a hundred government heads a week."

"Say no more," I said. Harry knew my habit of living

beyond my means. If he thought there was enough in this

to keep me living fat for some time to come, the buyer

had just purchased his merchandise. All of us have our

price. Mine just came a little steeper than most.

"I'm at the Artificial Creation complex. We'll expect

you in—say twenty minutes."

"I'm on my way." I dropped the phone into its cradle

and tried to pretend I was enthusiastic. But my stomach

belied my true feelings as it stung my chest with acidic,

roiling spasms. In the back of my mind, The Fear rose

and hung over me, watching with dinner-plate eyes,

breathing fire through black nostrils. The Artificial

Creation building: the womb, my womb, the first tides of

my life....

I almost crawled back into bed and almost said the hell

with it. The AC complex was the last place on Earth I

wanted to go, especially at night, when everything would

seem more sinister, when memories would play in brighter

colors. Two things kept me from the sheets: I truly did

not enjoy the loyalty checks I ran on government employ-

ees to keep me in spending money, for I was not only

required to report traitors, but to delineate the abnormal

(as the government defined that) private practices and

beliefs of those I scanned, violating privacy in the most

insidious of fashions; secondly, I had just promised Harry

I would be there, and I couldn't find a single instance when

that mad Irishman had ever let me down.

I cursed the womb which had made me, beseeching the

gods to melt its plastic walls and short-circuit those miles

and miles of delicate copper wires.

I pulled on street clothes over pajamas, stepped into

overshoes and a heavy coat with fur lining, one of the

popular Nordic models. Without Harry Kelly, I would

most likely have been in prison at that moment—or in a

preventive detention apartment with federal plainclothes

guards standing watch at the doors and windows. Which is

only a more civilized way of saying the same thing: prison.

When the staff of Artificial Creation discovered my wild

talents in my childhood, the FBI attempted to "impound"

me so that I might be used as a "national resource" under

federal control for "the betterment of our great country and

the establishment of a tighter American defense perimeter."

It had been Harry Kelly who had cut through all that fancy

language to call it what it was—illegal and immoral im-

prisonment of a free citizen. He fought the legal battle all

the way to nine old men in nine old chairs, where the case

was won. I was nine when we did that—twelve long years

ago.

It was snowing outside. The harsh lines of shrubbery,

trees, and curbs had been softened by three inches of

white. I had to scrape the windscreen of the hovercar,

which amused me and helped settle my nerves a bit. One

would imagine that, in 2004 A.D., Science could have

dreamed up something to make ice scrapers obsolete.

At the first red light, there was a gray police howler

overturned on the sidewalk, like a beached whale. Its

stubby nose had smashed through the display window of a

small clothing store, and the dome light was still swiveling.

A thin trail of exhaust fumes rose from the bent tailpipe,

curled upwards into the cold air. There were more than

twenty uniformed coppers positioned around the intersec-

tion, though there seemed to be no present danger. The

snow was tramped and scuffed, as if there had been a

major conflagration, though the antagonists had disap-

peared. I was motioned through by a stern-faced bull in a

fur-collared fatigue jacket, and I obeyed. None of them

looked in the mood to satisfy the curiosity of a passing

motorist, or even to let me pause long enough to scan their

minds and find the answer without their knowledge.

I arrived at the AC building and floated the car in for a

Marine attendant to park. As I slid out and he slid in, I

asked, "Know anything about the howler on Seventh?

Turned on its side and driven halfway into a store. Lot of

coppers."

He was a huge man with a blocky head and flat

features that looked almost painted on. When he wrinkled

his face in disgust, it looked as if someone had put an

eggbeater on his nose and whirled everything together.

"Peace criers," he said.

I couldn't see why he should bother lying to me, so I

didn't go through the bother of using my esp, which

requires some expenditure of energy. "I thought they were

finished," I said.

"So did everyone else," he said. Quite obviously, he

hated the peace criers, as did most men in uniform. "The

Congressional investigating committee proved the volun-

tary army was still a good idea. We don't run the country

like those creeps say. Brother, I can sure tell you we

don't!" Then he slammed the door and took the car away

to park it while I punched for the elevator, stepped

through its open maw, and went up.

I made faces at the cameras which watched me, and

repeated two dirty limericks on the way to the lobby.

When the lift stopped and the doors opened, a second

Marine greeted me, requested that I hold my fingertips to

an identiplate to verify his visual check. I complied, was

approved, and followed him to another elevator in the

long bank. Again: up.

Too many floors to count later, we stepped into a

cream-walled corridor, paced almost to the end of it, and

went through a chocolate door that slid aside at the

officer's vocal command. Inside, there was a room of

alabaster walls with hex signs painted every five feet in

brilliant reds and oranges. There was a small and ugly

child sitting in a black leather chair, and four men stand-

ing behind him, staring at me as if I were expected to say

something of monumental importance.

I didn't say anything at all.

The child looked up, his eyes and lips all but hidden by

the wrinkles of a century of life, by gray and gravelike

flesh. I tried to readjust my judgment, tried to visualize

him as a grandfather. But it was not so. He was a child.

There was the glint of babyhood close behind that ruined

countenance. His voice crackled like papyrus unrolled for

the first time in millennia, and he gripped the chair as the

words came, and he squinted his already squinted eyes,

and he said, "You're the one." It was an accusation.

"You're the one they sent for."

For the first time in many years, I was afraid. I was not

certain what terrified me, but it was a deep and relentless

uneasiness, far more threatening than The Fear which rose

in me most nights when I considered my origins and the

pocket of the plastic womb from which I came.

"You," the child said again.

"Who is he?" I asked the assembled military men.

No one spoke immediately. As if they wanted to be sure

the freak in the chair was finished.

He wasn't.

"I don't like you," he said. "You're going to be sorry

you came here. I'm going to see to that."

II

"That's the situation," Harry said, leaning back in his

chair for the first time since he had taken me aside to

explain the job. He was still nervous. His clear blue eyes

were having trouble staying with mine, and he sought

specks on the walls and scars on the furniture to draw his

attention.

The child-ancient's eyes, on the other hand, never left

me. They squinted like burning coals sparking beneath

rotted vegetation. I could feel the hatred smoldering

there, hatred not just for me (though there was surely

that), but for everyone, everything. There was no particle

of his world which did not draw the freak's contempt and

loathing. He, more so than I, was an outcast of the

wombs. Once again, the doctors who made their living

here and the congressmen who had supported the project

since its inception could gloat: "Artificial Creation is a

Benefit to the Nation." It had produced me. More than

eighteen years later, it had come up with this warped

super-genius who was no more than three years old but

who appeared to be a relic. Two successes in a quarter of

a century of operation.

For the government, that's a winner.

"I don't know if I can do it," I said at last.

"Why not?" asked the uniformed hulk the others called

General Morsfagen. He was a chiseled granite man with

exaggerated shoulders and a chest too large for anything

but tailored shirts. Wasp-waisted, with the small feet of a

boxer. Hands to bend iron bars in circus acts.

"I don't know what to expect. He has a different sort of

mind. Sure, I've esped army staff, the people who work

here at AC, FBI agents, the whole mess. And I've uner-

ringly turned over the traitors and potential security risks.

But this just doesn't scan like that."

"You don't have to do any sorting," Morsfagen

snapped, his thin lips making like a turtle bill. "I thought

this had been made clear. He can formulate theories in

areas as useful as physics and chemistry to others as

useless as theology. But each time we drag the damn thing

out of him, he leaves out some vital piece of it. We've

threatened the little freak. We've tried bribing him. The

trouble is, he has no fear or ambition." He had almost

said "tortured" for "threatened" but was a good enough

self-censor to change words without a pause. "You simply

go into his head and make sure he doesn't hold anything

back."

"How much did you say?" I asked.

"A hundred thousand poscreds an hour."

It pained him to say that.

"Double that," I said. For many men, the single hun-

dred thou was more than a year's salary in these time of

inflation.

"What? Absurd!"

He was breathing heavily, but the other generals didn't

even flinch. I esped each of them and discovered that,

among other things, the child had given them an almost

completed design for a faster-than-light engine which would

make star travel possible. For the rest of that theory alone,

a million an hour was not ridiculous. I got my two hun-

dred big ones with an option to demand more if the work

proved more demanding than I anticipated.

"Without your shyster, you'd be working for room and

board," Morsfagen said.

He had an ugly face.

"Without your brass medals, you'd be a street-gang

punk," I replied, smiling the famous Simeon Kelly smile.

He wanted to hit me.

His fists made flesh balls, and the knuckles nearly

pierced the skin—they protruded so harshly.

I laughed at him.

He couldn't risk it. He needed me too much.

The freak kid laughed too, doubling over in his chair

and slapping his flabby hands against his knees. It was the

most hideous laugh I had ever heard in my life. It spoke

of madness.

III

The lights had been dimmed. The machines had been

moved in and now stood watch, solemnly recording all

that transpired.

"The hex signs which you see on the walls are all part

of the pre-drug hypnosis which has just been completed.

After he's placed in a state of trance, we administer 250

cc's of Cinnamide, directly into his jugular." The white-

smocked director of the medical team spoke with crisp,

pleasant directness, but as though he were discussing the

maintenance of one of his machines.

The child sat across from me. His eyes were dead, the

scintillating sparkle of intelligence gone from them, and

not replaced by any corresponding quality. Just gone. I

was less horrified by his face and no longer bothered by

the dry, decaying look of it. Still, my guts felt cold and my

chest ached with an indefinable pressure, as if something

were trying to burst free of me.

"What's his name?" I asked Morsfagen.

"He hasn't any."

"No?"

"No. We have his code name, as always. We don't need

more."

I looked back at the freak. And within my soul (some

churches deny me one; but then churches have been

denying people a lot of things for a lot of reasons, and the

world still turns), I knew that in all the far reaches of the

galaxy, to the ends of the larger universe, in the billions of

inhabited worlds that might be out there, no name existed

for the child. Simply: Child. With a capital.

A team of doctors administered the drug.

"Within the next five minutes," Morsfagen said. He had

both big hands fisted on the arms of his chair. It wasn't

anger now, merely a reaction to the air of tension that

overhung the room.

I nodded, looked at Harry who had demanded to be

there for this initial session. He was still nervous over the

confrontation of the monsters. I tried not to mirror his

unease. I turned back to Child and prepared myself for

the assault upon his mental sanctity.

Stepping easily over the threshold, I fell through the

blackness of his mind, flailing . . .

... and woke up to white faces with blurred black holes

where the eyes should have been.

They mumbled things in their alien language, and they

prodded me with cold instruments.

When my vision cleared, I could see it was a strange

triumvirate: Harry, Morsfagen, and some unnamed physi-

cian who was taking my pulse and clucking his tongue

against his cheek like someone had told him doctors were

supposed to do when they couldn't think of anything

intelligent to say.

"You all right, Sim?" Harry asked.

Morsfagen pushed my lawyer/agent/father-figure out of

the way and thrust his bony face down at mine. I could see

hairs crinkling out of his flared nostrils. There were flecks

of spittle on his lips, as if he had been doing a lot of shout-

ing in rage. The dark blue of his close-shaved whiskers

seemed like needles waiting to thrust out of his tight pores.

"What happened? What's wrong? You don't get paid with-

out results."

"I wasn't prepared for what I found," I said. "Simple as

that. No need for hysterics."

"But you were yelling and screaming," Harry protested,

insinuating himself between the general and myself.

"Not to worry."

"What did you find that you didn't expect?" Morsfagen

asked. He was skeptical. I could have cared more, but not

less.

"He hasn't any conscious mind. It's a vast pit, and I fell

into it expecting solid ground. Evidently, all his thoughts,

or a great many of them, come from what we would

consider the subconscious."

Morsfagen stood away. "Then you can't reach him?"

"I didn't say that. Now that I know what's there and

what isn't, I'll be all right."

I struggled to a sitting position, reached out and stopped

the room from swaying. The hex signs settled onto the

walls where they belonged, and the light fixtures even

stopped whirling in erratic circles from wall to wall. I

looked at my watch with the picture of Elliot Gould on

the face, calculated the time, assumed a properly bland

expression, and said. "That'll be roughly a hundred thou-

sand poscreds. Put it on my earnings sheet, why don't

you?"

He sputtered. He fumed. He roared. He glowered. He

quoted the Government Rates for Employees. He quoted

the Employer's Rights Act of 1986, paragraph two,

subparagraph three. He fumed a bit more.

I watched, looking unshaken.

He pranced. He danced. He raved. He ranted. He

demanded to know what I had done to earn any pay what-

soever. I didn't answer him. He finished ranting. Started

fuming again. In the end, he put it down in the book and

vouchered the payment before pounding on a table in utter

frustration and then leaving the room with a warning to be

on time the following day.

"Don't push your luck," Harry advised me later.

"Not my luck, but my weight," I said.

"He doesn't take to a subordinate position. He's a

bastard."

"I know. That's why I needle him."

"When did the masochism arise?"

"Not masochism—my well-known God-syndrome. I was

just passing one of my famous judgments."

"Look," he said, "you can quit."

"We both need the money. Especially me."

"Maybe there are other things more important than

money."

Someone pushed us aside as equipment was trundled

out of the hex-painted room.

"More important than money?"

"I've heard it said..."

"Not in this world. You've heard wrong. Nothing's

more important when the creditors come. Nothing's more

important when the choice is to live with cockroaches or

in splendor."

"Sometimes, I think you're too cynical," he said, giving

me one of those fatherly looks, something I inherited

along with his last name.

"What else?" I asked, buttoning my greatcoat.

"It's all because of what they tried to do to you. You

should forget that. Get out more. Meet people."

"I have. I don't like them."

"There's an old Irish legend which says——"

"Old Irish legends all say the same thing. Look, Harry,

aside from you, everyone tries to use me. They want me

to spy on their wives to see if they have been laying with

someone else. Or they want me to find hubby's mistress.

Or I get invited to their cocktail parties so that I can

perform parlor tricks for a batch of drunks. The world

made me cynical, Harry. And it keeps me that way. So, if

we're both wise, we'll just sit back and get rich off my

cynicism. Maybe if a psychiatrist made me happy-go-lucky

and at peace with myself, my talent would disappear."

Before he could reply, I left. When I closed the door

behind me, they were wheeling Child down the corridor.

His empty eyes stared fixedly at the softly colored ceiling.

Outside, the snow was still falling. Fairy gowns. Crystal

tears. Sugar from a celestial cake. I tried to come up with

all the pretty metaphors I could, maybe to prove I'm not

so cynical after all.

I slid into the hovercar, tipped the Marine as he slid

out the other side. I drove into the street, taking the small

curb too fast. White clouds whooshed up behind me and

obscured the AC building and everything else I put behind

me.

The book lay at my side, the dust jacket face down

because it had her picture on it. I didn't want to see

amber hair and smooth lips imitating a bow. It was a

picture that disgusted me. And intrigued me. I couldn't

understand the latter, so I pretended to more of the

former than I felt.

I turned on the radio and listened to the dull voice of the

newscaster casting his tidbits on the airwave waters with a

voice uniformly pleasant whether the topic was a cure for

cancer or the death of hundreds in a plane crash. "Peking

announced late today that it had developed a weapon

equal to the Spheres of Plague launched yesterday by the

Western Alliance ..." (Pa-changa, changa, sissss, sisss

pa-changa, the Latin music of another station added in

unconscious sardonic wit) "... According to Asian sources,

the Chinese weapon is a series of platforms . . ." (Sa-baba,

sa-baba, po-po-pachanga) ". . . above Earth's atmosphere,

capable of launching rockets containing a virulent mutant

strain of leprosy which can be distributed across seventeen-

mile-wide swaths of territory ..." (Hemorrhoids really can

be dealt with in less than an hour at the Painless Clinic on

the West Side, another station assured me, though it faded

out before it would tell me how much less than an hour and

just how painless.) ". .. Members of the New Maoism said

today that they had assurances from . . ."

I turned it off.

No news is good news. Or, as the general populace of

that glorious year was wont to say: All news is bad news.

It seemed like that. The threat of war was so heavy on the

world that Atlas must certainly have had a terrible back-

ache. The 1980s and 1990s, with their general climate of

peace and good will made these last fourteen years of

tense brinksmanship all the more agonizing by compari-

son. That was why the young peace criers were so mili-

tant. They had never really known the years of peace, and

they lived with the conviction that those in power had

always been men of guns and destruction. Perhaps, if they

had been old enough to have experienced peace before the

cold war, their fiery idealism might have been metamor-

phosed into despair, as with the rest of us. I was very

young in the last of the pre-war years, but I had been

reading since before I was two and spoke four languages

by the age of four. I was aware even then. It makes the

present chaos more maddening.

Besides the threat of plague, there was the super-nuclear

accident in Arizona which had claimed thirty-seven thou-

sand lives, a number too large to carry emotion with it.

And there were the Anderson Spoors which had riddled

half a state with disease before the Bio-Chem Warfare

people had been able to check their own stray experiment.

And, of course, there were the twisted things the AC labs

produced (their failures), which were sent away to rot in

unlighted rooms under the glossy heading of "perpetual

professional care." Anyway, I turned the radio off.

And thought about Child.

And knew I should never have taken the job.

And knew that I wouldn't quit

IV

At home, in the warmth of the den, with my books and

my paintings to protect me, I took the dust jacket off the

book so I wouldn't accidentally see her face, and I began

reading Lily. It was a mystery novel, and a mystery of a

novel. The prose was not spectacular, actually intended

for the average reader seeking a few hours of escape.

Still, I was fascinated. Through the chapters, between the

lines of marching black words, a face seen at a party weeks

before kept drifting through my mind. A face which I had

been fighting to forget. . ..

Amber hair, long and straight.

"See that woman? Over there? That's Marcus Aureli-

us. Writes those semi-pornographic books, like Lily and

Bodies in Darkness, those."

Her face was sculpted, smooth planes and milky flesh.

Her eyes were green, wider than eyes should be, though

not the eyes of a mutant.

Her body was graceful, provocatively in vogue.

Her...

I ignored what he was saying about her, all the foul

things he suggested, and studied amber hair, cat's eyes,

fast fingers touching that hair, clasping a glass of gin,

jabbing the air for emphasis in conversation....

When I was finished with the book, I went and made

myself some Scotch and water. I am not a good bartender.

I drank it and pretended I was about sleepy enough for

bed. I stood on the patio, which is slung over the side of

the small mountain which I own, and I watched the snow.

I got cold and went inside. Undressing, I went to bed,

nestled down in the covers, and thought about ice floes

and blizzards and piling drifts, letting myself find sleep.

I said, "Damn!" and got up and got more Scotch and

went to the phone, where I should have gone as soon as I

finished the last page of the novel.

I could not understand the logic of what I was doing,

but there are times when the physical overrides the cere-

bral, no matter what the proponents of civilized society

might say about it.

Punching out the numbers for directory assistance, I

asked for Marcus Aurelius' number. The operator refused

to give me her real name and number, but I esped out and

saw it as she looked at the directory in front of her:

MARCUS AURELIUS Or MELINDA THAUSER;  22-223-296787/

UNLISTED.

So I said sorry and hung up and dialed the number I

had just stolen.

"Hello?"

It was a competent, businesslike voice. Yet there was a

sultriness in it that could not be ignored.

"Miss Thauser?"

"Yes?"

I told her my name and said she would probably know

it and then sounded pleased when she did. It was all as if

someone were possessing me, directing my tongue against

the will of the screaming particle of me that demanded I

hang up, run away, hide.

"I've followed your exploits," she said. "In the papers."

"I've read your books."

She waited.

"I think it's time I had my biography done," I said.

"I've been approached before, but I've always been against

it. Maybe like the primitive tribesmen who feel a photo-

graph locks their soul away inside it. But with you, maybe

it would be different. I like your work."

There was a bit more said, and it ended with me and

with this: "Fine. Then I'll expect you here for dinner

tomorrow night at seven."

I had suggested escorting her to dinner somewhere, but

she had said that was not necessary. I insisted. She had

said that restaurants were too noisy to discuss business. In

the course of the floundering planning, I had mentioned

my cook. And now she was coming here.

I went out and swallowed half a glass of Scotch on the

rocks (as a change from the Scotch and water), which

solved the problems I had just acquired upon hanging the

phone on its hook: a dry mouth and a bad case of the

chills.

It was stupid. Why be so afraid of meeting a woman? I

had met quite famous and sophisticated ladies, wives of

men of state and some of them statesmen themselves.

Yes, I told myself. But they were different. They were not

young and beautiful. That was where the core of my terror

lay, though that seemed just as unfathomable as anything

else.

At two in the morning, unable to sleep, I got heavily

out of bed and walked through the many rooms of my

dark house. It is a fine place, with its own theater and

gaming rooms, a shooting range, and other luxuries. But

there was no solace in seeing all I possessed.

I went into the den and closed the door, looked around

without turning on the lights. The machine stood in the

corner, silent, monstrous. It was what I had gotten up for

in the first place, though I had needed a few minutes to

admit it.

The headrest was ominous, a bulky electrode-strung pad

that curved to encompass the skull.

But my nerves demanded soothing.

The chair that folded into the machine was like the

tongue of some mythical beast, some man-eater and steal-

er of souls.

I could see the hollow compartment which would swal-

low me with a single lick, and it terrified me. But I needed

soothing. My hands twitched, and a tic had begun in the

corner of my mouth. I reminded myself that other gener-

ations never had the advantage of a Porter-Rainey Solid-

State Psychiatrist and that many people, even these days,

could not afford one even when modern technology made

it possible. I forced myself to forget the emptiness that

would take me later. For the moment comfort was

enough. And a few explanations . . .

I sat down in the chair.

My head touched the pad.

The world swiveled up and away, while darkness de-

scended, while fingers probed where they should not be,

while my soul was split open like a nut and the meat of my

fractured personality was drawn forth for a close examina-

tion (in search of worms?).

Proteus Mother taking a thousand shapes, but never to

be caught and held to tell the future. . . .

The life spark flickering, then holding steady as a frozen

flame. And a very vague awareness even in the womb,

where plastic walls were soft and sophisticated thermostat-

ic computers maintained a succor-filled environment. Where

plastic walls were giving—but somehow unresponsive. . . .

He looked up into the lights overhead and sensed a man

named Edison. He sensed filaments even as his own fila-

ment was disconnected from the womb....

And there were metal hands to comfort him. . . .

And ... and ... there ... and...

SAY IT WITHOUT HESITATION! The voice was

everywhere about me, was booming, was reassuring in its

depth of passion.

And there were simu-flesh breasts to feed him. . ..

And ... and ...

OUT WITH IT! The computerized psyche-prober imi-

tated thunderstorms and symphonies filled with cymbals.

And there were wire-cored arms to rock him; and he

looked out of his swaddling clothes and ... and ..,

GO ON!

. . . looked up into a face without a nose and with blank

crystal eyes that reflected his reddened face. Unmoving

black lips crooned, "Rock-a-biiiii-bay-beeeee in theee treeeee

(thriddle-thriddle) tops . . ." The thriddle-thriddle rattling

interjection was, he found, the sound of voice tapes chang-

ing somewhere inside his mother's head. He searched for

his own voice tapes. There were none.

GO ON, GO ON!

And he looked up out of swaddling clothes when he

esped an understanding and . . . and . . .

IF YOU HESITATE, YOU WILL BE LOST.

I don't remember it after that.

YOU DO.

No!

Yes. YESYESYES. The machine touched part of my

mind with blue fingers. Dazzling clouds of neon gas ex-

ploded inside my head. I CAN MAKE THE MEMORY

EVEN SHARPER.

No! I'll tell it.

TELL.

And he looked up out of swaddling clothes when he

esped an understanding, and his first words were ... were

FINISH IT!

His first words were: "My God, my God, I'm not

human!"

FINE. NOW RELAX AND LISTEN. My electronic

David sorted through the miasma of our conversation and

interpreted my dreams for me. There wasn't any simple

harp music to accompany his readings, though. YOU

KNOW THAT THE "HE" IS REALLY YOU. YOU

ARE SIMEON KELLY. THE HE OF YOUR ILLU-

SION IS ALSO SIMEON KELLY. YOUR PROBLEM IS

THIS: YOU ARE OF THE ARTIFICIAL WOMB. YOU

WERE CONDITIONED FROM CONCEPTION TO

HAVE HUMAN MORES AND VALUES. BUT YOU

CANNOT HOLD YOUR MANNER OF CREATION UP

TO THE LIGHT ALONGSIDE YOUR MORES AND

THEN MANAGE TO ACCEPT BOTH.

YOU ARE HUMAN. BUT YOUR MORES TEACH

YOU TO FEEL THAT YOU ARE STRANGELY

LACKING IN HUMAN QUALITIES.

Thank you. I am cured now and I must leave.

NO. The thunderstorms were firm in their denial. THIS

IS THE THIRTY-THIRD TIME YOU HAVE HAD THIS

SAME ILLUSION-NIGHTMARE. YOU ARE NOT

HEALED. AND THIS TIME I FEEL MORE BELOW

THE SURFACE OF THE DREAM, AN ARRAY OF

FRAGMENTED TERRORS WHICH SHOULD NOT BE

THERE. TELL ME.

There is no more.

TELL ME. The bonds on the chair were tight around

nay arms and legs. The headrest seemed to suck out the

contents of my head.

Nothing.

A WOMAN. THERE IS A FEMININE SPECTER IN

THOSE TERRORS. WHO IS SHE? SIMEON, WHO IS

SHE?

An author I have read.

AND MET. TELL ME MORE.

Blonde. Green eyes. Full lips like—

SOMETHING MORE.

Full lips.

NO. SOMETHING ELSE.

Let me the hell alone!

TELL ME. It was the voice of a king. The kind who

will not have your head lopped off, but who will decapi-

tate you with words and shame.

Breasts. Big breasts that I— That I—

I KNOW YOUR PROBLEM. I CAN SEE, FROM

YOUR CONDITION, THAT YOU FIND YOURSELF

IN LOVE WITH HER.

No! That's disgusting!

YES. DENIAL DOES NOTHING TO CHANGE RE-

ALITY. REFUSAL TO ACCEPT DOES NOTHING

MORE THAN MAKE EVENTUAL ACCEPTANCE

MORE DIFFICULT. YOU LOVE THIS WOMAN. YET

YOU HAVE THIS COMPLEX WHICH ELUDES ME IN

ITS ENTIRETY. SIMEON, DO YOU REMEMBER THE

SIMULATED FLESH BREASTS?

I remember.

THOSE ARTIFICIAL BREASTS HAVE COME TO

SYMBOLIZE YOUR INHUMANITY TO YOU. YOU

WERE NOT SUCKLED LIKE A MANCHILD, AND

THE LOSS OF THAT HAS DONE STRANGE THINGS

TO YOU. YOU ARE AFRAID OF WOMEN, OF—

No. I'm not afraid of women. She was just disgusting.

You would have had to see her to understand. All this

spoken reasonably, calmly.

NO. YOU WERE NOT DISGUSTED. YOU ARE

AFRAID, BUT NEVER DISGUSTED. YOU BACK

AWAY FROM EVERYTHING WHICH YOU DO NOT

UNDERSTAND IN THIS LIFE. THIS WOMAN IS

BUT ONE PART OF THAT. YOU BACK AWAY BE-

CAUSE YOU CANNOT SEE WHERE YOUR PLACE

AND PURPOSE COULD LIE IN IT ALL. YOU SEE

NO MEANING IN LIFE AND YOU ARE AFRAID TO

SEARCH FOR ONE, FEARING YOU WILL EVEN-

TUALLY DISCOVER THERE IS NO MEANING.

THAT IS WHY YOU SPEND SO MUCH, LIVE FASTER

THAN YOU SHOULD.

May I go?

YES. GO AND DREAM NO MORE OF PROTEUS

MOTHER. YOU WILL DREAM NO MORE. NO

MORE ... NO ... MORE ...

It spat me into the room.

After every session with the machine, I was drained,

lifeless, some sea creature tossed up on the beach and

gasping its respiratory tract raw in a search for the medium

of life it was accustomed to. I tossed my fins now, made

smacking noises with my mouth, and wiped at my head,

which was clammy and cold. I made my way into the bed-

room and collapsed onto the mattress without pulling the

covers over me.

I tried to encourage pleasant dreams of Marcus Aure-

lius.

And of Harry. And of money.

But somewhere, quite far way, there was a voice calling

to me, a voice which was like chains dragged across a

stone floor, like yellowed paper cracking between my

fingers. It said, "You're the one they sent for. I know you

are. I hate you. .. ."

V

The next morning, there were rumors of military distur-

bances along the Russian-Chinese border, and news

dispatches from the scene said that Western Alliance

troops had met in brushfire contact with the Orientals and

that a joint report of American and Russian forces would

be filed with the U.N. to protest alleged presence of

Japanese technical advisors in the Chinese ranks.

The new Chinese horror weapon circling the tired plan-

et had been named Dragonfly by the press. Trust those

boys to be original. Or at least colorful. Or, perhaps, just

first.

I paid no attention to it. Thus it had been since my

childhood, one mini-war after another, one "incident" on

the heels of the last, pompous world leaders spouting even

more pompous declarations. A man is not constantly

aware of his hands. A bird must sometimes forget the sky

is there because it has become so familiar to him. Such it

is with disaster and war. You can forget as long as it does

not touch you, and you can live in better times. It takes a

certain peripheral vision deficiency, but that can be mas-

tered with but a small expenditure of time and energy.

I had oranges and tea for breakfast, which helped my

headache.

Outside, the city crews had finished cleaning up the

snow. The streets were bare, but the buildings and trees

were smothered with whiteness. Fences became delicate

laceworks. Trees and shrubs were conglomerations of ici-

cles welded together by a frost-fingered artist. A bitter

wind swept over everything, stirring the snow, whipping it

against the neat houses, the sides of hovercars, and up my

nose.

It was as if Nature, via the snowstorm, had tried to

reclaim what had once been hers but was now lost to her

forever.

Clouds, heavy and gray, betrayed the advent of yet

another storm. A low flock of birds streaked north, some

kind of geese or other. Their calls were long and cold.

I passed by the broken store window where the howler

had lain on its side the night before. It had been removed.

There were no police around.

I passed by a church which had burned sometime after

I had returned from the AC complex. Its black skeleton

seemed leeringly evil.

At AC, the hex signs were on the walls, the lights were

dimmed, the machines stood sentinel, and Child was

tranced.

"You're late," Morsfagen said. His fists were drawn

tightly together. I wondered if he had opened his hands

at all since he had stalked out of the room last night.

"You don't have to pay me for the first five minutes," I

said. I smiled the famous smile.

It didn't cheer him up much.

I slid into the chair opposite Child and looked him

over. I don't know what I expected to have changed.

Perhaps it seemed too much to believe that he could go to

bed at night and get up in the morning, still in that same

condition. It was as if some healing process had to be

underway. But, if anything, he looked more wrinkled and

decaying than before.

Harry was there. He had worked a third of the Times

crossword, in ink as he always does, so he must have been

there for some while. Like an old woman coming early to

mass. "You sure?" he asked me.

"Quite," I said. And I was immediately sorry for having

cut him so short. It was the atmosphere of the place,

so damned military. And it was Morsfagen. Like Herod—

trying to destroy the Child. I was the assassin sent out. And

whether my knife was an intellectual or a physical one

made no difference, really.

I was on edge for another reason; there was a certain

dinner guest this evening....

This time I parachuted through the emptiness of his

consciousness, no flailing, ready for the drop that awaited

me....

... Labyrinth ...

The walls were hung with cobwebs, and the floor was

strewn with dirt and bones. The walls were multi-fluted,

polished here, rugged here, but a uniform gray every-

where. Far down there, somewhere in the nova-like center

of the mind was the Id. It gave out the same, nearly

unbearable whine that all Ids do. And somewhere above, in

the blackness and the perfect quietude, was the area

where the conscious mind should have been. It was clear

that the mind of a super-genius was strangely unhuman.

Most minds think in disconnected pictures, flittering arrays

of scenes and snatches of the past, but Child's mind created

an entire world of its own, a realism within his mind, an

analogue that I could explore like the actual terrain of

some lost land.

There was a clacking of hooves, and from the source of

light at the end of the tunnel came the outline in smoke,

then the form in flesh of a Minotaur, nut-brown skin and

all textures of black hair, eyes gleaming, steam caught in

the large ovals of the nostrils.

"Get out!"

I mean no harm.

"Get out, Simeon."

There was a blue field of sparks crackling above his

head, and psychic energies shot thin sporadic flames from

his nostrils, the steam to hang there afterwards.

"Leave a monster his only privacy!"

I too am a monster.

"Look at your face, Monster. It is not wrinkled like a

dried fig; it is not old beyond its years with seeing; it is not

caked with the dust of unlived centuries. You pass for

human in your world. You pass. At least, you pass."

Child, listen to me. I am—

He charged and grasped at me with hoof-hands. I

fashioned a sword from my own fields of thought and

smashed him broadside on the head.

The sound rang in the stone corridors.

My arm reverberated with the force of the blow.

And he was gone, a vapor in the darkness, a phantom.

Holding the green glow of the weapon, I advanced

slowly down the twisting halls toward the inner part of

him, where his theories would bubble, where thoughts

would run in molten rivers. I came out, finally, on an

earthen shelf above a yawning pit. Far below, eternities

away, drifting and glowing, was a circular mass, and the

heat it threw into my face was great.

From here had come the Minotaur. From here came

everything.

I reached out and grasped for anything, a subcur-

rent, a cracked image, the shell of a daydream, and I

caught a Hate River ebbing and flowing. HATE, HATE,

HATE HATEHATEHATEHATE-HA-TE-HATEHATE

HATE . . . Somewhere in the middle of it, a two-headed

thing swam, cutting the foul waters with a viciously spined

neck. I caught the "T" in HATE and traced it along the

currents, searching. T leads ToThumb and a suckling

mouTh . . . and The sucking mouTh suddenly To a brown

nipple and a moTher's breasT . . . and again The T

dominaTed . . . and I allowed The river To carry me

ineviTably on Toward Theorem. . . .

Theory Through Tees ... Through Thousand Times

Tedious Tiring . . . Ten Times one Times Two To Sub-

OughT-seven in drepshler Tubes now being used . . .

The flood was too fast. I could see the theory, but I

could not divert it fast enough toward the ocean in the

distance where a waterspout whirled (taking the thoughts

to the little bit of conscious mind he possessed). The

thoughts that were now being spoken in dust whispers in a

room far away—the thoughts being recorded by serious

men with serious faces who listened, no doubt, quite

seriously.

Then the drug must have finally taken hold of him, or I

would have been swallowed alive by a mind construct and

destroyed in his cauldron of insanity. The two-headed

beast had swum near without drawing my notice. It

caught my eye, now, as it moved swiftly, its mouth

gaping, a giant cave that drooled. . . .

I lifted my sword as it raised its huge head above me to

strike. Then there was a sudden, jerky slip like an old

movie reel that has been spliced, and everything went into

slow motion. It was like an underwater ballet. At that

rate, it would have taken an hour for the beast's jaws to

reach me and snap me up, and I slew him as his red eyes

glistened and as a strange THRIDDLE THRIDDLE

came out of his throat. Or hers.

Turning back toward the river, I directed thoughts

toward the slow-moving waterspout until so much time

had passed that I thought I had better get out before I lost

my own character identity.

I turned away from the screaming Id pit.

I walked back the gray tunnel.

Cobwebs brushed my face.

But there were stairs leading upward this time....

VI

There were candles in her green eyes, reflections of

those on the table. The same flickering amber glinted from

her hair, made the smooth flesh of her one bared shoulder

glow with health. Her sequined, well-cut, Oriental some-

thing-or-other was dazzling.

"I'd want nothing held back," she said over the remains

of two Cornish game hens of that special diminutive and

fleshy mutant strain. Bones and gravy contrasted with her

loveliness.

"Nothing," I assured her for the hundredth time.

We sipped the wine, but I felt giddy without it, and her

flesh did not need any more glow than it had.

"All your feelings toward Artificial Creation, toward the

FBI, and all the others who have used you."

"That could be a blunt book."

"Backing down?"

"Just making an observation."

"Anything watered down would be a flop. Believe me,

sensationalism sells a book."

I remembered some passages from Bodies in Darkness

and smiled and drank my wine and felt my face grow red.

The tape changed. The colored lights playing on the

walls to either side ceased. Then a recording of Schehera-

zade came on, and the walls took on color again, spat-

tered with orange, showered over with yellow, bursting

with crimson along the baseboard.

She took her wine to the Plexiglas view deck that

bubbled out from the east wall of the living room. She

stood on the transparent floor of it, as if suspended above

the side of the pine-covered mountainside. My mountain

thrusts downward into a jumble of shattered rocks, falls

off from there into the sea. White waves crashed against

the stones below, and a dim echo of the ocean's agony

reached us.

I walked after her, forcing myself to be calm, and stood

next to her.

The moon was high and full and scarred. My guest was

quite beautiful, flushed with its light, but she did not seem

altogether real. A woman out of Poe or modeling herself

after one.

"I keep thinking of Dragonfly," she said, her eyes up

there where it might be.

Toward the horizon a cloud drifted, gray against the

purity of the sky. The storm had failed to materialize.

"Why do people enjoy ugliness so much?" she asked. It

was such an abrupt change of pace that I was not able to

cope with it. I shuffled my feet and smacked my lips at

the wine I still held, and tried to think why people did

that. She went on without me. "There's all this beauty,

and they try to make it ugly. They like ugly movies, ugly

books, ugly news."

By then, I was functioning. "Perhaps, in reading about

the worst parts of life, the terrible parts of reality seem

more tame by contrast, more easily lived with."

Her lips puckered, as if of their own volition, two

separate strips of flesh, entities not a part of her body.

"Truthfully now," she said, "what do you think of my

books? You say you've read them."

I was thrown off balance. I had known a couple other

writers, and I had never known exactly where criticism

should stop and praise begin, exactly how much negative

vibration they could take about their work. The last thing

I wanted to do was insult or enrage this woman. "Well

..."

"Truthfully," she said, signaling me that maybe she was

tougher than the other artists I knew.

"You mean ... the ugliness in them?"

"Yes. Exactly." She turned back to the ocean. "I tried

writing beautiful books about sex. I gave that up. It's the

ugliness that sells." She shrugged her shoulders. Amber

hair danced. "One must eat, mustn't one?" Another shrug.

Another amber jitterbug.

I was overly aware of the tightness of her bodice.

With the soft light on her face, the vista of the pines

and ocean framing her refined beauty with their own

rugged majesty, I wanted to grasp her, to draw her to me,

hold her, kiss her. At the same moment I felt myself

gripped by that desire, I experienced a counter-emotion, a

disgust and a deep fear. It was connected to The Fear, to

the wombs, to the first moments of my conscious life

when I first knew what I was—and what I wasn't.

I brought a hand to that bare shoulder, felt her flesh,

resilient and warm, scintillating beneath my fingers.

I took my hand away, breathless and confused.

Turning from her, I began to pace the room, holding

my wine glass so tightly that it must surely soon snap in

my fingers. I examined the original oil paintings on the

walls, as if I were looking for something, though I could

not guess what. They had hung here so long that I knew

their every detail. There was nothing new in them, not for

me.

What did I fear? What about her terrified me so much

that I could not bring myself to complete the advance I

had made, to draw fingers downwards from her shoulder,

to touch the thinly sheathed roundness of her breasts? Was

it only what the computerized psychiatrist in the den told

me it was—? Was it only that I feared making too many

contacts in the world and then discovering that I did not

belong? It seemed to me that it ran deeper than that,

though I could not find any other motivations that made as

much sense.

She had turned away from the window, and she looked

at me curiously. I suppose I looked like a caged animal,

prowling that room, sniffing the brilliant canvases for

solace and finding no solace.

I turned and looked at her. But when I tried to speak,

there was nothing to say. I thought, perhaps, in some way

I could never understand, she realized the nature of my

problem more completely than I did.

She crossed the room, her body doing wonderful things

to the clinging black fabric of her dress, and placed a soft

hand upon my lips. "It's getting late," she said.

She took her hand away.

"When do we start?" I asked.

"Tomorrow. And we tape all the interviews."

"Tomorrow, then," I said.

"Tomorrow, then."

And she was gone in a whirlwind of efficiency that left

me standing with my drink in my hand and my "goodbye"

in my mouth like a lump of used lard.

I went to bed to dream ...

. . . and I woke up needing comfort, a strange comfort

that I could find but one place:

IT IS FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, the metal

headshrinker said as it swallowed me and thrust its ethereal

fingers into the pudding of my brain.

I know.

RELAX AND TALK.

What should I say? Tell me what it is that I could—that

I should say to you.

START WITH A DREAM IF YOU'VE HAD ONE.

I always have one.

THEN START.

There are storm clouds in the sky: dark, thick, mysteri-

ous. There is no place where the sun shows. Below all this

piling grayness, beneath the scudding harbingers of rain,

there is a hill, a large and rounded hill formed by Nature

into a grotesque, gnarled lump, a blemish upon the face of

the earth. There are people ... people ,..

GO ON. The same old urging—go on, go on, go on. ...

There are people ... and there is a cross ... a wooden

cross....

FOCUS ON THE CROSS. WHAT DO YOU SEE

THERE?

Me.

YES?

Nailed. Blood. Much blood. White, festered wounds

dribbling rusty blood around the edges of little holes, neat

little holes like the cavities left when you rip the buttons

from the faces of rag dolls.... Rusty blood there ...

WHO IS IN THE CROWD?

Harry. I see Harry there. He's weeping.

WHY IS HE WEEPING?

For me.

WHO ELSE?

I'm thirsty.

WHO ELSE?

I'm thirsty. Very thirsty.

THEY WILL GIVE YOU WATER SOON. THEY

WILL SLAKE YOUR THIRST. NOW WHO ELSE IS

IN THE CROWD?

Morsfagen is casting dice for my cloak. And over there,

beyond him, is a pregnant woman who is . . .

GO ON, PLEASE.

Please this time?

GO ON.

I look at her belly ... and ... there ... is Child. He is

weeping too. But he is not weeping for the same reason

that Harry is. He isn't weeping for me. It's because he

wants up there where I am. He wants out of that woman's

womb and up on the cross, nailed and bleeding and thirsty

and dying. He wants it so bad that he writhes inside her in

fury, wanting out....

DO YOU KNOW WHY HE WANTS OUT?

For the same reason I am happy to be there.

YOU ENJOY BEING ON THE CROSS?

Yes.

WHY?

WHY?

I don't know.

DO YOU SEE ANYONE ELSE IN THE CROWD?

No! Oh, no! Oh, my God, my God, my God!

WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS THE MATTER?

No! You'll spoil it/me! I can't! Don't you see my

station, my purpose, my nature? It must be my purpose! I

haven't got another one, there isn't another one, this must

be it! Get away from me! No!

WHAT IS IT? WHO DO YOU SEE?

Melinda. Floating, naked. Floating toward the cross. No!

Stay away! You'll spoil my purpose!

STOP IT.

Help! Help me! Don't let her touch me! Forgod'ssake-

she'snaked ... naked ... nakednakednakednaked!

STOP DREAMING! WAKE! LISTEN TO ME; HOLD

YOURSELF TOGETHER AND LISTEN TO ME.

I—

QUIET. COMPOSE YOURSELF. I WILL INTER-

PRET YOUR DREAM. THOUGH I MUST SAY THAT

THIS THROWS A NEW LIGHT ON YOUR PSYCHE.

DO YOU SEE WHY YOU ARE THE ONE ON THE

CROSS? NO NEED FOR AN ANSWER, PURELY

RHETORICAL. YOU SEE YOURSELF AS CHRIST—

WHAT A NEW DEVELOPMENT!—MORE PRECISE-

LY, AS THE INCARNATION OF CHRIST AS REP-

RESENTED BY THE SECOND COMING. THERE

ARE PARALLELS, OF COURSE, BETWEEN YOUR

CONDITION AND THE STORY OF THE CHRIST.

YOU COULD SAY THAT YOUR OWN BIRTH WAS A

VIRGIN BIRTH, FOR EXAMPLE. YOU WERE NOT

CONCEIVED BY FLESH IN FLESH AND THE SPILL-

ING OF SEED, BUT BY THE GENETIC ENGINEERS

AND THE COMPLEX CYBERNETIC ARTIFICIAL

WOMBS. AND THERE ARE YOUR SUPER-HUMAN

POWERS. PERHAPS THEY ARE NOT AS ALL-EN-

COMPASSING AS THOSE OF THE CHRIST MYTH,

BUT THEY ARE SUFFICIENTLY STRONG TO NUR-

TURE YOUR DELUSIONS.

YOU WERE NOT ABLE TO SEE A PURPOSE TO

YOUR LIFE, SO YOU CHOSE TO CAST YOURSELF

IN THE ROLE OF A SAVIOUR. IT SERVES A DOU-

BLE PURPOSE: FIRST, IT REINFORCES ALL YOUR

CHRISTIAN MORES, ALL THE THINGS THEY

THOUGHT YOU SHOULD BELIEVE AS YOU WERE

RAISED (THOUGH THEY WERE AS INTERESTED

IN SUPPLYING YOU WITH MORES THAT WOULD

KEEP YOU IN LINE AS MUCH AS THEY CARED

ABOUT YOUR HAVING A CHRISTIAN UPBRING-

ING); SECONDLY, IT GIVES A PURPOSE AND

MEANING NOT ONLY TO YOUR LIFE BUT TO THE

ENTIRE UNIVERSE WHICH SOMETIMES SEEMS

UNEXPLAINABLY CHAOTIC TO YOU—THE WARS

AND THE SUFFERING, THE REST OF IT.

/ am thirsty.

IN A MOMENT. I MUST FINISH WITH THIS FIRST.

YOU SEE MORSFAGEN CASTING DICE, FOR HE

DESPISED AND ONLY USES YOU FOR HIS OWN

ENDS. THE CLOAK SYMBOLIZES YOUR LIFE,

YOUR PURPOSE, YOUR INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY.

THERE SEEMS TO BE A HINT OF THE FUTURE IN

YOUR DREAM, A MOMENT OF CLAIRVOYANCE,

AND YOU SHOULD BEWARE THE MAN.

Go on.

YOU SEE CHILD AS A THREAT TO YOUR NEAT-

LY BUILT THEORY. HE IS ANOTHER VIRGIN

BIRTH, OF THE ORIGIN THAT YOU ARE OF. YOU

REALIZE THAT HE HAD BUILT THE SAME SEC-

OND-COMING THEORY TO EXPLAIN HIS OWN

PURPOSE IN THE WORLD. YOU UNDERSTAND

THAT SINCE HE HAS MET YOU, HIS LIFE PUR-

POSE HAS BEEN SHATTERED AND THAT HE IS

HUNTING FOR ANOTHER ANSWER. YOU DON'T

WANT TO HAVE TO DO THAT YOURSELF. YOU

DON'T WANT TO HUNT.

THE WOMAN, MELINDA, IS ALSO A THREAT TO

YOUR PURPOSE (OR, RATHER, TO THE FANTASY

PURPOSE YOU HAVE CREATED FOR YOURSELF).

CHRIST COULD NOT FALL PHYSICALLY IN LOVE

WITH A WOMAN. BUT YOU HAVE. ADMIT IT. THIS

IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE. LISTEN AND KNOW

THAT YOUR PURPOSE IS TO LOVE AND COMFORT

AND TO BE LOVED IN RETURN. OTHERWISE, YOU

FACE ONLY SCHIZOPHRENIA.

Could that be a purpose, though?

IT IS THE OLDEST PURPOSE. WASH YOURSELF

CLEAN OF FALSE PURPOSES. ALLOW ME TO ES-

TABLISH A SERIES OF PERSONALITY TAPES TO

REINFORCE YOUR FALTERING SENSE OF REALI-

TY AND TO SUBDUE THIS CHRIST SYNDROME.

THE REASON YOU LIVE IS TO LOVE. SO IT IS

WITH MOST HUMAN BEINGS. DON'T SEARCH

FOR A LARGE PURPOSE, FOR MORE COMPLEX

MEANINGS, FOR THE WHY OF THE WORLD OR

THE REASON IN HATE AND WAR. BE SATISFIED

THAT YOU KNOW YOURSELF. IT IS A WISE MAN

WHO KNOWS HIMSELF.

WE WILL PROCEED WITH THE HEALING

NOW....

VII

The following morning, as I stepped out of the elevator

near the top of the AC complex, Harry intercepted me

before I had taken more than four steps toward the room

where Child waited for another session. His round face

was drawn, pale, and lined with heavy creases that had

not been there before. He looked as if he had not slept all

night. A cursory examination of his rumpled clothes and

withered shirt collar was proof of that. He grasped my arm,

digging his fingers in until it hurt, and steered me across the

corridor to an unused office, pushed me inside, followed,

and closed the door behind us.

"Cloak and dagger?" I asked. It was amusing to see him

engaged in some melodramatic play like this. Yet also

terrifying. If Harry Kelly thought there was a need for

caution, there most assuredly was. Normally, he had the

greatest respect and confidence in due process, even in these

days. Many considered him a Polyanna. Now Polyanna was

scared, and nothing short of an ogre could have managed

that.

"Look, Sim, lay off the arrogance with Morsfagen. Say

yes sir and no sir and thank you sir, and help me get his

temper down. No smart cracks and no more antagonism.

I haven't ever asked you much, but I ask this. Listen, son,

it might mean everything we've worked for if you can't

keep yourself in check."

"I can't stand the man," I said.

"Neither can I."

"What's happening?"

"The situation is worse than any public communications

are reporting it. The Chinese and their Japanese advisors

have set up a command post on the Russian side of the

Amur River. Only maybe a hundred yards' worth of inva-

sion, but they refuse to move backwards on request. On

the Chinese side, troops have been massing for four days.

A special spurline was laid down, and troop trains are

running in on the hour from the main tracks that pass east

of Nunkiang, through the Khingan Mountains."

I took it all in. I'd never been much on geography, and

I must have looked rather blank, for he flapped his arms

in despair and started on me again.

"On the other side of the border there, the Russian

towns Zavitaya, Belogorsk, Svobodnyy, and Shimanovsk

lie in a straight line, each within striking distance of the

other. Zavitaya contains a missile complex trained on

several Chinese population centers. Belogorsk is the site of

an extension of the Khabarovsk laboratories, dealing with

the problem of lasers. It's the place where the news has

been coming from lately—about the possibility of the

equivalent of a death-ray. The entire area has become, in

the last ten years, a strategic one. If the Chinese can

sweep it, they can isolate that arm of the Soviet Union.

Toward this end, portable nuke facilities have been moved

in on the Amur, pointed toward Zavitaya."

"War," I said. "But we've had it before. And we've

been expecting it now for fourteen years or more. Why

does this mean I have to brown-nose Morsfagen?"

"I received an interesting telephone call from a judge

who was a friend in law school, back in the age of the

dinosaur. He reported that Morsfagen has been asking

around about the possibility of impounding you—just like

they tried years ago."

"We already won that case."

"That was in peacetime. What Morsfagen wants to

know is whether the looming war will make a difference."

"Law is law," I said.

"But in time of national crisis, it can be suspended.

And the word that the general got, my friend tells me, is

that he can pull it off. It will be nasty, dirty, replete with

complications—but possible. He'd much rather work with

you the way it now stands. But if you drive him to the wall

or anger him more than his limit of tolerance, he might

decide that its worth a risk to his career. He might try it."

I didn't feel well. I wanted to sit down, but that would

have been a sign of weakness. I knew Harry was just

barely holding up now. There wasn't any use to make it

worse for him. "What's your considered opinion?" I asked.

"The same. Only I think it's more possible for him to

succeed than even his own advisors told him."

I nodded. "We'll play it cool, Harry. We'll play it so

cool that there will be icicles hanging from the walls. Let's

go."

He breathed a sigh of relief and followed me out of the

empty office, down the hall, through the door, and into

the hex-walled room.

"You're late," Morsfagen said, consulting his watch and

scowling at me as he waited for the thrust of my tongue.

Maybe he had decided one more witty remark on my part

would be the weight to push him to action.

I didn't give him the chance. "Sorry," I said. "I got held

up in traffic."

He looked genuinely perplexed, opened his mouth to

say something, closed it, and ground his teeth together. It

was almost as if he would have preferred being insulted to

being treated civilly.

I had come to AC only for the money this time, not to

demonstrate my super-humanness, my Christlike talents.

The therapy the mechanical psychiatrist had given me had

worked deep and had taken root. But with a few more

paychecks in my pocket, Melinda and I could be vaga-

bonds for an eternity, running from the ugliness, the filth,

war, and the people who made it. I thought of the future

in the context of the two of us, though I could not yet

know how she felt, whether her interest in me matched

mine in her. But from a life of pessimism, I had suddenly

become optimistic, and I refused to consider any but the

brightest of possible futures.

Child was tranced. His mouth sagged slightly, and his

twisted teeth could be seen beyond. His hands trembled

against the arms of his chair, even though he was asleep.

They administered the drugs while I watched, then stepped

back to allow the freaks to converse in the way only we

could understand.

I parachuted from the room, down into the labyrinth,

not trusting to stairs that might have been there yesterday

and not today....

Hooves clacked on rock, the sound like splinters of flying

glass.

There was an outline like a child's scrawl, not nearly so

definite and real as the day before. Whether he was losing

power to refute my presence or merely planning some de-

ception to put me off my guard, I did not know.

There was the vague odor of musk, all the textures of

dark hair that fell like night mists, but all of them merely

hazy crayon lines.

"Get out!"

I mean you no harm at all.

"And I wish not to harm you, Simeon. Get out."

Yesterday, as you well remember, I fashioned a sword

from the very air itself. Do not forget that. Do not

underestimate me, though I am in your regions.

"I beg of you to leave. You're in danger here."

From what?

"I cannot say. It is in the knowing that the danger lies."

That is not good enough.

"It is all I can say."

I swung the sword, and he dissipated into an eerie blue

vapor that clung to the walls until the wind whistled in to

blow it away. It curled along the stone, slithered back to

the pit, and was gone.

Two hours into the session, as I was sprawled on the

dirt shelf above the pit, grasping at thoughts and diverting

them toward the waterspout, a "G" drifted out, and with

another level of my mind, I plucked at it and traced it. G

to Grass . . . which is dark Green and bendinG over the

hills ... toppinG and hills to see GGGGG ... G ... G

. . . GodGodGodGodGodGod like a whirlwind moaninG

and babblinG over the Glens, cominG, cominG, twistinG

relentlessly onward toward me ... G ... G ...

I reached out to take a strong hold on the thought pro-

gression, partially because it might lead to something of in-

terest and partially because it was such an odd, intense, and

seemingly fractured train of images. Suddenly, the earthen

shelf under me gave way, plunging me down toward the

flaming pit which sent climbing streams of magma after

me.

Wind lifted me toward the river before I could plunge

into that cauldron of teeming madnesses.

I flew as if I were a kite.

The river swept me toward the ocean.

The water there was choppy and hot—and at places

steam rose in spirals like smoke snakes.

At places, ice floated, dying.

I fought for the surface, desperately trying to stay on

top of the turbulent currents, giving up thought direction

and fighting only for the integrity of my own mind. Then I

was suddenly up and splashing through the pillar of foamy

water that roared into the black, heavy sky; like a bullet

out of a rifle, whining, spinning, was I. Splashing, sputter-

ing, I showered out of the mind of Child.

The room was dark. The hex signs glowed on the walls,

partially illuminating the serious faces of the generals and

the technicians. They were all grimacing, like gargoyle

masks.

"He threw me out," I said in the quiet which stretched

to the breaking point.

Everyone stared at me with what was obviously a bad

case of doubt. I wished I had been more conciliatory in

the days past, so that this incident would not appear so

suspicious.

"He just threw me out of his mind," I said. It was the

first time it had ever happened to me. I explained that.

They listened. Somewhere, I was certain, Child was laugh-

ing. ...

VIII

Rumors of war.

The Chinese had slaughtered the skeleton staffs manning

the last two Western Alliance embassies in Asia. One was

in what had once been called Korea, the other on the home

islands of Japan. The Japanese denied any responsibility for

the massacre on their own soil. The story was that citizens

of Japan and Chinese ancestry had forced their way past

the police detailed to protect the Western delegates, had run

wild in an orgy of destruction. The Japanese press pointed

out that the West, perhaps, should have been expecting this

for years, their own silly trade practices—from which

China had always been excluded—drawing the wrath of a

poverty-stricken people who felt cast aside from the main

commerce of the world. Other reports, from eyewitnesses

in Japan, said that the Japanese police did not resist the

mob at all and actually seemed to be directing its blood-

thirsty attack on the foreign consulate offices.

The Tri-D screen showed headless bodies for the benefit

of those with shallow imaginations. In the streets of

Tokyo, masses marched, holding those heads speared on

the ends of sharpened aluminum poles. Dead eyes of our

countrymen looked back at us from the other side of the

screen....

The Pentagon, the same morning, announced the dis-

covery of the Bensor Beam, which was capable of shorting

out all synapses in the nervous system of the human body,

leaving the brain imprisoned in a mindless hulk. Named

after its creator, a Dr. Harold Bensor, the beam was

already being referred to (by Pentagon officials and their

cronies in the War Bureau of Moscow) as "the turning

point in the cold war." I knew the idea had come from

Child; I recognized it the way one recognizes a bad dream

that someone has made into a movie. But the censors had

learned from the mistakes they had made with me in the

past; the public would never hear of Child.

I wondered, for the briefest of moments, what sort

of inhuman fiend this Bensor must be to want his name

attached to such an inglorious device. Then I lost my

facade of superiority when I considered that the weapon

might just as likely have been called the Simeon Kelly

Beam, for I had been the middleman who had brought it

into existence. I was more responsible than anyone, even

Child, for whatever might be done with this damn thing.

Pictures on the screen showed two Chinese prisoners on

whom the weapon had been used. Spastic, they flopped

about on the gray floor of their cell, eyes sightless, ears

unhearing, bodies pulled by strings that none of us could

really understand.

I turned it off.

I pushed my unfinished breakfast away from me, and

got my coat from the closet. I was to meet Melinda at her

apartment for another session with the tapes, and I did not

want to miss that. Besides, seeing her might somehow

purge the strain of guilt running through me.

AM the interviews were at her apartment, for she had a

ton of equipment there and preferred not to have to move

it. That evening, we were going to the theater—and that

was no business meeting at all. In fact, even the interviews

had become more than business.

I was trying to heed the mechanical psychiatrist's advice,

trying to reach out and accept human warmth. And, in

small ways, in kisses and touches and a few words, she

was returning that effort of mine. To me, so thirsty

for companionship after a long drought, it seemed even

more heady and fine than it really was.

The sky was gray again and whispered snow. It was

a regular oldtime winter, a Christmas-card sort of winter,

sparkling and white and bitterly cold. Somewhere, far

above, floated Dragonfly.

"Did the FBI mistreat you at any other time?" she

asked.

The black microphone dangled above us like a bloated

spider. Behind the couch where we sat, reels hissed in the

recorder, like voices commenting on the anecdotes I told.

"It wasn't the FBI so often as the doctors who treated

me not as a human being, but as something to be pricked,

punched, and jabbed. I remember once when—"

"Keep remembering," she said. She reached behind the

couch and stopped the recorder, laid the microphone

down. "That's enough for one day. If it gets moving too

fast, you lose the color. You try to tell too much, and the

details are blurred. It happens with everyone."

"I guess so," I said.

She was wearing a peasant blouse with a scalloped

neckline, an alluring garment which I found myself staring

at. And that, in itself, was a shock. It did not seem

disgusting, as it once would have. In fact, the fullness, the

perfect roundness of her breasts seemed deeply exciting.

Perhaps my mechanical psychiatrist had been correct. Per-

haps this was a purpose, a legitimate need.

She saw the direction of my gaze. Perhaps that was

what produced the following. Perhaps she had been await-

ing a sign, and this was the one she saw and chose to

travel by. She moved across to the couch, beside me,

leaned upwards, and made a bow of her mouth, her

tongue flicking along those lips, anxious and inquiring.

What is your mood, the tongue seemed to say. How do

you feel? Is this the time? Why don't you do something?

I obeyed the wishes of the tongue. I found it with my

lips and with my own tongue, drew her closer with both

arms and felt her breasts against my chest And was not

disgusted.

In time, I had touched the flesh of her legs, felt the

warmth of her thighs through her skirt. Then I scooped

her breasts free of the peasant blouse and tested them

with teeth and lips. An hour passed in a minute and had

the joy of a century encapsulated in it

When I left, a hundred yearsa minute later, she stood

clean and brown before me, a dark, supple woman

divested of all but the glow of her body's youth. We kissed

and said nothing more—for there was nothing more to be

said. Not really. Even if I could have forced words out of

my dry throat

Outside, I stood in the drive a long while, oblivious of

snow and wind, of stares from passing pedestrians, of the

need to get to the AC complex and confront Child again.

For the first time in my life, I had been with a woman.

And she had been a goddess, a good place to start. I didn't

feel tainted or used or sinful. I felt better, in fact, than I

had ever felt in my life. In time, I managed to think enough

to get to the car, climb inside, and close the door. I sat for

maybe five minutes before I started it.

My body seemed to burn where she had touched me.

Flames played along my lips. All the way to AC ...

I was in love: no question. I had not even attempted

to esp her thoughts ever since we had met, and that was

unusual. I was affording her the same privilege that Harry

received, but before she had done half as much for me as

he had, before I really knew whether she would accept me

or demolish me. I imagine I had been afraid, at first that

she would love me—and later that she would not.

How foolish I had been at the party, weeks ago, when

she had been pointed out to me and when, later, she

seemed to take interest in me, looking my way, smiling,

doing all the things a woman can do. I had bolted. I had

left the party even before anyone asked for parlor tricks,

and I had hidden in my house, pretending I had not been

interested in her. Foolish. I was so much older then—but

I am younger than that now.

A band of peace criers had gathered before a precinct

house, for some unfathomable reason. They had stoned

the windows. A phalanx of coppers was charging down

the steps as I went by.

At a red light two blocks on, a stream of young mili-

tants burst from an alleyway to the right, half a block

down a side street. They were chanting something, though

I could not make out what it was. Behind them, a howler

roared into view, its cupola roof narcodart gun cutting

down the young people as they cursed the government, the

enemy government, and anyone else who came to mind.

Before the light turned, I saw the howler roll over a

young girl, snapping her back like kindling. That was not

standard procedure, by any means. And before I could

chalk it up to an accident, the driver of the armored

vehicle rammed a boy no older than seventeen, crushed

him against the steel pole of an arc lamp, and moved on.

I went through the light to avoid the uproar.

I had to detour around the elevated highway ramp I

had intended to use, for there were several hundred peo-

ple on it, setting up roadblocks in a display of civil

disobedience. I noticed that for the first time there were

adults with the peace criers. In fact, it seemed that there

were more adults than young people.

I took the next ramp, went up, and struck for AC at

my top speed. In the time since I had heard the morning

news, what could have happened to open the adult ranks

like this? My heart beat too fast, and I felt a gnawing

urgency to do something, anything. But what?

The only thing I could do was esp Child, find new

weapons, make our side stronger so that, if there was a

war, we would win and at least a semblance of normality

would return in which Melinda and I could carve our own

niche and be alone.

I suppose such an attitude was not noble. But war itself

leaves no room for nobility. Only the clever survive. And

not always do they survive intact

By the time I reached the government building, I had

made my decisions. I loved Melinda. I feared Child. He

could throw me out—and perhaps he could swallow me

up. There was something behind his repeated warnings to

leave his thoughts alone. Something to do with the G

association I had chanced upon the day before—

something to do with God. I could not sacrifice myself in

that strong, mutated subconscious. Yet I could not permit

the war and its destruction to touch my life, to end the

first warm relationship I had ever had with a woman. Life

was only now worthy of living. I could not permit the

Chinese to snatch it away from me. So I would go in his

mind this last time, rip loose everything that I found and

send it up. Then I would get out, collect my cash, and

beat a hasty retreat. I would tell them first thing when I

got there: after this, the job is ended, go in peace.

As with most plans, nothing went that way.

They were waiting for me when I got there. Morsfagen

was the center of a flurry of dispatches. Messengers boys

came and departed, carrying sheafs of paper. He signed

and checked and rejected, and somehow managed to keep

track of what was going on with Child at the same time.

Harry fidgeted nervously with his hands, tearing at his

fingers as if they were detachable. There were bags under

his eyes; the old tic had reappeared in his left cheek; his

hair was uncombed.

I esped out to see what was troubling him, breaking the

rule which I had established of my own accord. I violated

him.

On the surface of his mind, it floated in horrid detail.

The thought symbol his psyche had given it was a bloated

body floating in a pool of blood. Beneath the image, I

read it: WAR. The rumors were not just rumors any

longer. Brushfire stuff had gotten hotter, though the details

seemed vague in his mind. A black, rotting corpse, floating

in clotted pools of blood ...

Extremely shaken, I sat down at the table and looked

across at Morsfagen. There were tiny beads of perspira-

tion on his chin and forehead. His big hands were full of

communiques, and they seemed to shiver just the slightest

bit.

Damn them! Damn them all!

"The details?" I asked.

"Alliance troops attacked the Chinese division which

had crossed the Amur River, drove them back into

Chinese territory. Forty-seven Chinese killed. Four Japa-

nese. Seven Alliance troops: two American, one British,

and the rest Russian. An hour later, Zavitaya ceased to

exist. No radio in or but. The nuke missile site there does

not respond to calls. Belogorsk reports a tremor and a

play of odd lights in the sky. Seismographs say it was a

pocket-bomb, a very low-yield nuke. The troops at the

border no longer report back. The Asians have moved

into Russian territory with a vengeance. No confirmation

yet. But you can bet on it."

"I'll help," I said.

"You're damn right you will." His face was not pretty.

"Is he ready?"

Morsfagen looked at Child. "Tranced," he said. "We

were waiting for you before administering the Cinnamide.

What have you come up with overnight? What do you

think about yesterday?"

I shrugged. "Nothing more than what I've already said.

He threw me out because I was reading some thought

stream he did not want me to see. It was easy for him,

because I never expected it. I was still underrating his

potential. I won't do that again."

"Certain?"

"As certain as I can be."

"How is that?"

"Very."

"Let's begin, then."

"Some things have to be done first," I said. "Wake him

from the trance. Tell him I have not been here yet. Tell

him I've disappeared and that, until I'm found, you'll have

to go on without me. Tell him you'll be interrogating him

while he's drugged and that he better come across if he

knows what's good for him. Ham it up a little. But make

it sound convincing. After he is tranced and drugged

again, I'll go in secretly. Maybe he won't even know that

I'm there."

A black, bloated body (Melinda) floating...

Damn them to Hell!

Morsfagen attended to removing the mutant from the

room and going through the procedure I had suggested.

"Are you sure of yourself, Sim?" Harry asked. He

sounded as if he wanted me to quit. But we both knew

that was impossible. Only Child could develop the ultimate

weapon, a weapon that would make war obsolete. I had to

go in there until he formulated it—possibly urge him into

it if he was unwilling. But there was no backing down—

not with the world and Melinda hanging on everything

that transpired in this room.

They brought Child back in ten minutes. He was

tranced and be was drugged.

The world was heavy on my shoulders and Death was

walking with me...

...and ...

... like a cat with cotton feet, I went quietly, quietly,

quietly. . . .

Like a ghost in an old house, I went without form.

Like the breezes of spring, I walked softly.

There was no echo of my steps, and the labyrinth was

wanner than usual. The walls were actually unpleasantly

hot to the touch, a strange change from the clinging cold

that had infested the place. I rounded a bend and saw the

Minotaur sitting on his haunches, unaware of my presence.

He was reading a leather-bound Bible, completely absorbed

in whatever the verses had to tell him.

Slowly, so as to disturb nothing, I passed. He never

looked up.

Pasiphae, here is your unholy child.

Minos, your labyrinth is ugly. It needs a paint job and

some common comforts.

Theseus, keep your weapons girdled to your hip, for

there will be no killing of a sad and unpretentious Mino-

taur.

The pit was a tangerine color, pulsating with mind-heat

which coursed upwards, washed the rim, flowed down the

stone corridors, evicting the leeching cold. The center of

the pit was a fierce white dot.

I reached out and grabbed the nearest thought. It was a

weapon. But it was nothing that could cure the world's ills,

no ultimate dragon as I sought.

A formula to cause ratlike mutations in unborn babies ...

A beam that could dehydrate living tissue, make a living

body into a dry, dead corpse in seconds . . .

There were many of the G association thoughts, several

different progressions of them which led toward one dis-

tant point whose nature I could not quite ascertain ...

. . . an inordinately large number of G thoughts. I was

interested in exploring their source and their destiny, but

they did not seem to be what I needed.

Then I found it. A stray thought, the ultimate weapon.

F . . . Field . . . Force Field capable of stopping all

entry by anything, including air, permitting neither bombs

nor bacteria passage . . . Field. . . .

I latched onto it and gently nudged it toward the main

stream, toward the waterspout. The ultimate weapon—the

weapon to make weapons obsolete.

I thought I was being subtle, but I was underestimating

Child. There was a clacking of hooves behind me.

"Get out!"

No. You don't understand.

"It's you who doesn't understand!"

He pounced. I stepped quickly aside, struck at him, and

sent him flailing over the brink, into the pit. . . .

Far out at sea, the Force Field Theory was shot up the

waterspout. Soon it would be spoken in a dark room,

taped, transferred to paper, and sent by special messenger

to those who might put it into practice.

Sighing, I turned to go. But with a low, animal grum-

ble, the walls of the labyrinth began to sway and the floor

to shake and buck.

From somewhere down in the pit, there was a scream,

a deafening ululation which spread throughout the caverns,

echoing and re-echoing. Clutching the edge of the pit, the

Minotaur was pulling himself onto the earthen ledge. I

could see that it was not the Minotaur who screamed, but

I could not see anyone else.

What is it? I asked above the noise.

His eyes were wild. He opened his mouth, and I watched

horrified as snakes came slithering forth.

I kicked him. He fell back into the pit, all the way to

the churning bottom this time.

When I turned back to the caverns, the ceiling caved in

before me, dirt and stones spilling over my shoes. And

there was no longer an exit. I wasn't going to get out!

I turned to the sea and saw the waterspout dying,

withering. There was no hope in that direction, either. No

hope! And the situation was so ironic, like Jesus finally

sealed into his tomb. But I had given up that delusion,

hadn't I?

What, for crissakes, is going on? I yelled above the

constant screaming from the pit. Then it occurred to me

that I might find the nature of the disaster by latching on

to a stray thought. I reached out into the turbulent river

and found all of them starting the same way:

G ... G ... GGGGGGGGGG . . . leadingG to Grass

rollinG over the hills . . . to G . . . G . . . GGG God God

God like a tornado whirlinG across the Glen, relentless,

relentless ... GGG GGod GGod ... GODGODGOD ...

random ... what purpose? ... trap Him like the wind to

find His purpose, find my purpose . . . GGGGGGG. . . .

I realized the nature of it then. Child's purpose in life

had been shattered when he met me—just as mine had

been shattered when I encountered him. He could no

longer pretend to himself that he was the Second Coming,

the virgin birth. But he had no mechanical psychiatrist to

treat him and could find no woman to love or who would

love him. He was so restricted in his physical existence

that he had to turn to theory and intellectual search to

find an answer.

GODGODGODGOD ... trapped in a cavern to tell

answers . . . GGG . . .

I followed the thoughts to their end; I was swept along

with them against my will. I never should have listened in

the first place. It was the ultimate theory, and he had

proven it beyond a doubt.. ..

He had tried to contact God.

He had found the whereabouts of the Supreme Being,

the plane of existence upon which He lived.

He asked what meaning there could be to life and to

the chaotic world in which man lived. And he was an-

swered; he solved his problem.

He asked what was at the center of creation. And he

found out.

And now I was trapped down there.

There were three of us.

Child, Simeon, and God.

And we were all three quite insane.

TWO

Humanity

Restored...

I

Trapped within the convoluted miasma of Child's mind,

I eventually lost all consideration of what was real and

what was not. Here, in the fascinating chiaroscuro ruins of

his subconscious mind, the shattered mental analogues

were every bit as concrete as the world I had known

outside of Child. The stones were textured by the weather

as they were in the world beyond; the trees had as many

leaves of as many different shades of green as any I had

seen before; the wind was not a constant, but changed

from bitter cold to almost suffocating warmth, and was

moderate more often than not. There were birds and a

wide variety of land-bound animals, which, though subtly

different or wildly mutated from their "real" parallels,

were always believable, detailed and rich with color and

habits. At first, I catalogued the differences, the fine points

of distinction between the real world and this analogue of

Child's interior, but that only made me melancholy, unsat-

isfied, and soon had me acting like a manic-depressive. I

realized that, if this were to be my home for the remain-

der of my days, I would have to forget the other world I

had known. And for my own peace of mind, I would also

have to forget that when Child died, we all died, trapped

here inside him. It was bizarre, but it was my new reality

and required my swift adaptation.

So I adapted.

At first, there had been a time of madness. When I

recovered my wits, I did not know how much time had

passed, and I could not remember much of what I had

done. I remembered running along canyons of stone which

shimmered and changed colors around me, thrust up, dis-

solved, formed new projections, a living rock that sang

mournful dirges and sometime burst into long, wailing

screams that made me fall and cover my ears and scream

in sympathy. There were visions of mottled skies that were

sometimes all shades of yellow, sometimes all shades of

red, sometimes an ugly whirl of black and brown. I had

climbed in cold places and had followed descending trails

into warm ones. I had been on strange seas with waters

thick like syrup, and in lakes where the surface reeked of

brandy. I had seen dark shapes, like huge spiders, dancing

along endless webs of sticky white thread, and I had seen

maggots crawling in the walls, disappearing in the stone

when I came close enough to examine them. At times, a

force of monumental strength passed me, a whirling mad-

ness of surging energy, which was He, which was God, the

maddest of the three of us. And then I was sane, lying on

the floors of a wide tunnel, stretched full length, as if I

had fallen while running from something that terrified me.

I sat up, looked around me, knew that it was so, that I

was trapped here, and decided there was nothing to do

but make the most of it.

Besides, I nurtured a grain of hope. Perhaps the mind

of the wizened boy, this Child, would regain its sanity.

Perhaps, then, there would be a way out, a way to return

to my own body. They would keep me alive, back there in

AC, feed me through my veins, keep my body processes

functioning, hoping for my return just as I was. If Child

returned to normal, I could go upwards through the now-

blocked conscious mind and return to my own flesh. Free.

With even the smallest minim of such hope, it was better to

maintain my sanity instead of losing it again and being able

to return to my own body as a madman.

And, too, there was the possibility that, with my mind

intact, I could search out this nightmare landscape and

find some chink in the cold stone that kept me from

leaving. I could explore for days on end, having nothing

better to do, and perhaps discover the passage out. I knew

the chances were small. Child's mental analogue was im-

mense, as big as an entire world. It would require years

and years just to investigate each corner of it. And a mind

destroyed, a mind seeking total refuge from reality, would

hardly leave any breach of its seal against the world, no

matter how small that breach and no matter in what

distant corner it existed.

But I had hope. It was all I had, and it was warmly

nourished.

II

Sane and determined, I set out on foot to know the

place where I now found myself. There was no need to

provision for the journey, no matter what its length, for I

no longer held the needs of flesh. There was no such thing

as hunger, only a vague memory of what thirst had once

been. I couldn't know pain, nor pleasure—except on an

emotional, mental level. Though the world seemed physi-

cally as tangible as the real one, I moved through it like a

spirit, autonomous. I could have formed food and drink

from the air—as I had formed that sword to fight off the

Minotaur, for I still contained the same level of psychic

energy. But it would have been a charade with but a single

purpose: to make this world less alien and more like the

one I had left. And I had decided that I could only survive

by forgetting that other reality and accepting this one

fully.

There was no need to rest as I walked, for my analogue

body did not tire. I could run, letting the wind whip my

hair, for hours on end, without feeling a sore muscle, the

tugging fingers of gravity.

I came out of the caves onto a ledge no more than two

feet wide that wound out of sight along the side of an

immense gray mountain studded with shrubs and gnarled,

weathered trees whose extensive roots tangled through

the rocks like tentacles. Above, mists obscured the skies,

thick roiling masses of gray clouds that moved fast from

horizon to horizon. Fingers of the fog came down now

and then, slithered along the mountainside, touched the

trees and wrapped my legs so that I could not even see

my feet

I walked upward along the trail, deeper into the

darkness that lingered there. At places, the trail disap-

peared, and I had to climb across to where it started

again. I feared nothing, for I could not be hurt. As long as

Child lived and as long as I was trapped within him, I was

invulnerable.

Days or perhaps weeks later, I had gained the summit

of the great mountain. It was constructed of four pinna-

cles, each as tall as a man, which formed, between them,

a nest large enough to stand in. I nestled there, hunched

over, and looked out across the world that was his tor-

tured mind.

The mists hung all about me and shrouded the path I

had walked up on. It was cold and wet and left glistening

droplets on my skin. I went naked, though, for cold could

not harm me and was not a discomfort. It was merely a

quantity now, much like light or darkness. I accepted it and

watched the dew bead on the hairs on my arms and legs,

like pearls in the shimmering gloom.

I looked out from the peak in all directions. At times,

the curtains of gray would part, present a flash of some

strange scenery. It was as if all parts of the world were

equally near at hand from this summit—but a mile at

most. I saw green fields and a silver river cutting through

them like the winding body of a python. I saw a cold

white plain where there was snow and where slabs of ice

jutted upwards like broken teeth. I saw what seemed to be

stretches of impenetrable jungle, black flowers blooming

on the dark green foliage. I saw endless miles of sand, burnt

white beneath a relentless sun, columns of the dried earth

stirred upwards into the sky and winding erratically across

the barren landscape. There was a land of broken ebony

mountains where sunlight was reflected from polished

Stygian surfaces and came back brown.

It was clear that I would have to explore all these places

if I were ever to find the way out—if there happened to be

a way out. I rose from the earth and left the four stone

pillars, began the trek down the mountainside once more.

I was a third of the way down when the dark-winged

creatures descended through the fog, swept by me, cutting

the air with a sharp and unpleasant whine. I looked down

where they had disappeared through the lowest layers of

the mist. As I watched, they reappeared, rising gracefully

toward me. There was a smooth coating of black down

over their large, batlike bodies, giving them a warm,

smooth, gentle look. Set in each of their faces were two

wide eyes, deep brown things which looked back at me

with an almost unbearable melancholy.

They settled onto the trail before me, their wings curling

in on themselves, rolling into closed scrolls on their backs.

Distorted, many-fingered hands reached on tiny arms from

the point where their shoulders and wings connected: use-

less arms.

"Where do you go?" the largest creature asked me.

"To all the lands," I said.

"They are wide. And many."

"I have time."

"That is true."

"Where do you come from?" I asked. I knew they were

creatures fashioned by Child's mind, just as he peopled all

the landscapes with animals of eerie forms. I was intrigued

by their seeming intelligence.

"We are from—from the place where he is trapped."

"Where Child is trapped?" I asked,

"Yes," the smaller one said.

"Why doesn't Child come himself? Why must he take

the form of birds?"

"He is trapped. He wants out, but there is no way but

except through the dumb animals of his landscapes. He

can reach into us and make us more than we once were

and thus monitor this land through others' eyes."

"Can you take me to where Child is trapped?" I asked.

"We don't know."

"He can tell you."

"He doesn't know either," the smaller one said.

"Yet both of you are Child," I said. "In essence, you

are your master." The wind buffeted us, but we did not

mind it

"I suppose," the larger bird said. "But there's really very

little we can do about it. We can help him as he wishes. But

he can only impart his general intelligence and psychic

power to us. He cannot fully acquire us and speak through

us in the direct manner he might wish."

The smaller bird stepped forward and bent conspiratori-

ally. "You are aware, of course, that he is mad. And being

mad, he has become separated from total control of this

inner world of his. It remains, and he keeps it functioning.

But he does not share the harmony of it any longer."

"I understand," I said. "But why did you come to me?"

"We live in the mountains," the larger one said. "While

you were here, it was our duty to speak with you about

your journey."

"Speak," I said. It was raining slightly, a warm rain.

"We don't know what to say," the large bird said. "We

have his general urgency in mind. We understand that he

wishes us to say something to you concerning your idea to

travel. But we cannot say exactly what he feels about it.

We think, ourselves, that he wants you to continue, that

he wants us to urge you on. Perhaps he feels that you will

find the place where he dwells and will liberate him."

"Possibly," I said.

"We know the place is dark. It is cold and there are

things crawling on a blue floor, crawling all around him so

that he does not have a moment's peace. That is the sum

of our impression."

"I will watch for it," I said. "Now, I must be going."

Without a word, they leaped over the chasm, fell

through the mists until their wings buoyed them up, then

soared, beyond me, and were gone, making chattering

noises like dice rattled on a felt table.

I went down, past the entrance to the inside of the

mountain out of which I had come earlier. I walked for

another day and reached the tree-shrouded floor of the

valley, where the air smelled of pine and of flowers.

Waiting for me there was a creature much like a wolf,

with a hugely swollen head and a mouth full of long teeth.

Eyes like chips of iron, gray and unperturbed.

"I'll guide you through the valley," it said, scratching

paws in the earth. "I know it, and I can give you a look at

every hole there is."

"Fine," I said.

"First, you must change yourself. Assume my form so

that we can go more easily."

I had forgotten that the gossamer body analogue which

I had assumed for my journey through Child's mental

landscape was not the only shell I could use to contain my

psychic energy. There was nothing essential about a hu-

manoid form, for that psychic energy could take any form

that I wished. Gently, I released the surface tension of the

current, permitted my human body to shimmer and dissi-

pate. I flowed, settled, grew lower and sleeker until I was

a double for the wolf that waited for me.

I snuffled, scratched at the earth with razored claws and

saw the dirt runnel before me. In this new body, I had a

sense of power which I had never experienced before, a

new perspective on the world about me. It seemed as if, I

had been born to lycanthropy.

"Let's go," I said.

The wolf turned and loped away between the thick

trees, his big paws scattering dry, brown pine needles

which carpeted the forest floor. They rained over me as I

hurried to follow his example.

As I ran, my breath steamed in the cold air, and my

massive lungs heaved within my chest at the strenuous pace

we set.

The ground flashed under me. Flimsy brush parted

before me and closed, quivering, behind. To either side,

small animals ran, chittering and whimpering with their

fear. It was a completely structured reality, and it had

made me the king of beasts in this part of the woods. I

felt a burgeoning excitement at my omnipotence and my

superiority over these lesser creatures. And while I sa-

vored this heady attitude, I never once realized the danger

that was reaching cold fingers around me.

I enjoyed the muscular rhythm I had never known

either as a man or spirit, closed the gap on the wolf,

reached it by the time we broke through the pines into a

grassy field. We ran side by side, easy, smoothly, sure of

ourselves.

The journey had begun in earnest

III

We prowled the depths of the woods, sniffing through

the underbrush for the scent of Child, the odor of his

mental essence. There were times when I forgot every-

thing but my powerful shoulders, my claws and my teeth,

the keen powers of my black nostrils.

We rooted through the dark cavelets along the valley

walls which opened on the floor of the forest, seeking

into their darkest recesses, where our eyes refused to be

totally blinded. We overturned old, rotting lop in the

woods, seeking burrows through which the entrance to

Child's prison might be found. We padded through the

foaming cascade of a waterfall which issued from the valley

rim a thousand feet above, searching the subterranean

chambers beyond that wet curtain, finding nothing. If there

was a place with a blue floor where Child lay encircled by

undescribed creatures of a malignant nature, it was no-

where within this valley. Neither was there a doorway into

the conscious mind, no exit from this place where I found

myself trapped. The journey was not to have a swift con-

clusion.

For some reason, I was glad for the extension. There

was a strong reluctance to part with the form I had taken,

to return to the world and be, again, a man.

It was snowing outside as the wolf led me across the

last expanse of open fields before the impenetrable wall of

mist which separated this part of the analogue world from

the next. Big white flakes clung to our coats and frosted us,

kicked up in clouds as we pranced forward toward the

distant veil of fog.

We were sidetracked by the scampering of a covey of

quail-like animals off to our left. My lupine friend broke

into a wild, breathtaking run, teeth bared ferociously, lips

drawn back, slobber falling from his wide mouth.

I followed, feeling the wind and snow and scenting the

flesh of small creatures.

I saw him leap: muscles taut. I saw him land: a spring's

coils jammed together.

The air reverberated with the dying squeal of his prey.

In that instant, as the agony of death pierced the air

and the pride of a successful hunt shook me, I was more

wolf than man, and the danger began to grow more

imminent.

I stepped next to him and snuffled at his catch, watched

him rend the flesh. Blood fountained up as an artery was

struck, spurted crimson across his dark snout, stained his

teeth, dotted the snow around us. It steamed in the cold

air, this blood, and it had a smell uniquely its own.

I howled.

We tore at the animal together, and he kept his eyes on

me for a long while, cold gray eyes that did not disclose

the thoughts behind them. When we were done, our noses

red and the snow around us sodden, I did not feel disgust-

ed, but rather invigorated.

We turned back to our original pursuit and gained the

shifting walls of mists through which I would have to

pass.

"I want to return," I growled.

"So?" His breath reeked.

"May I return?"

"For what purpose?"

"To join your pack."

"That is most unwise. That is foolish, and you know it,

and you must journey. Be gone."

Then he turned and loped away, head hunched between

his rugged shoulders, eating up yards in a single bounding

leap.

Looking up at the even gray of the sky, I felt a hollow

longing within me, and I pawed the snow away from the

earth, dug the ground into a crosshatch of runnels. I

wiped my bloodied snout in the snow and lapped the

stained whiteness. I wanted to remain here forever, with-

out regard to my true heritage and nature, to bound after

the disappearing wolf and follow him to his pack. In the

night hours, there would be deep dens in hidden caves to

sleep in warmth and to climb upon some sleek and lovely

female with gray eyes and a shiny black snout. During the

daylight hours, there would be prowling in the fields and

in the sparsely treed grounds before the thickness of the

forests themselves. There would be blood and camarad-

erie, running together, killing together, defying the leaden

skies with my fellows....

Yet there was some nagging reason why I should go

beyond the mists to the next segment of this landscape,

though I could not remember what it was. I stepped

through the mists, tensed, but found no danger, only cool

wetness. I growled deep in my throat and broke through

to the other side.

The journey continued.

In the new section of the subconscious universe, there

was a taste of Ireland: stony ground, rolling hills so low

that one could be seen beyond the other, the smell of the

sea, flat areas of land marshy with the backwash of the

tidelands. Waiting for me by a column of limestone that

stood like a proscenium pillar without benefit of its stage,

was a centaur. His head was ringed with golden curls

which fell to his shoulders and framed a face of striking

masculinity: broad forehead above deep black eyes that

spoke of perserverance and a strong will, high aristocratic

cheekbones, a proud Roman nose, a blocky chin. His

shoulders were brawny, his arms rippling with muscles

that seemed to possess a will and intent of their own. From

the middle of his flat belly on down, he was a black

stallion of formidable proportions, the lines of a thorough-

bred in his long legs.

"My name is Kasostrous, and you may call me Kas," he

said.

"Call me Simeon," I growled, my voice a tangled hiss of

barely understandable guttural syllables.

"You must now acquire the form of the centaur," Kas

said, leaving the limestone thrust and ambling toward me.

His hooves clacked on the stony ground, sent sparks up

once or twice. His long, flashing length of tail whipped in

the breeze, tossed from side to side with lazy power.

"I like wolfhood," I said, pawing the ground, my nails

whispering on the dew-damp rock. I continued to stroke,

sharpening them for later kills.

"You like it too well," Kas said. "That is the trouble."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked, staring up at

him with my flint eyes, hoping to strike terror in him. I

failed.

"You have fallen into the danger of identifying too

closely with the analogue you permit your psychic energy

to assume. Though such energy is malleable, the surface

tension can grow stronger with time, sap the will to return

to any other analogue, any other shape. Too long a time

as a wolf, and you will find yourself trapped not only in

the form, but in the character of the creature."

"Nonsense." But the word was said without conviction

and in such a guttural rumble that it only reinforced what

Kas said.

"You disprove your own words."

"I'm an esper," I said.

"So?"

"I understand these things."

"You do not grasp the difference of this subconscious

universe," he said. "There is a certain thing about it which

will trap you—you especially, given your past and your

mental condition."

I pawed the earth. "Help me grasp it," I said at last,

doubtful. I did not want to have to believe what he was

saying. I only wanted to be free to run and tear flesh and

mount the sleek females in the dark shadows of the dens.

"Child's mental landscape is peopled only with creatures

from legends and mythology. He read extensively in those

areas from the moment he could understand language,

and he viewed hundreds of senso-tapes on the subject. It

interested him, because he thought he might find a pur-

pose even stronger than the one which was connected with

the Christian mythos: the Second Coming which he be-

lieved was himself."

"But this wolf does not take the form of a mythological

creature," I argued with my wolf-mouth.

"There is a Tibetan legend which tells of monks trans-

formed to wolves. They were men who loved luxury and

betrayed the true intentions of their religion. They in-

dulged in women and in drink, in jewels and in food, and

all that was pretty and satisfying to the senses. Their god

came to them after they had defiled mere children in a

brothel contaminated with all manners of evil. In the

disguise of demons, their god offered them immortality for

their souls. It was a test to see if they were completely

depraved, or whether there was still some minim of decen-

cy within them. But all nine of the monks eagerly grasped

the straw of endless life at the sacrifice of nirvana, of

eternal life on another plane. And so he gave them im-

mortality and crushed their souls. But he gave them immor-

tality as wolves, as vicious reeking creatures hated and

feared by all, creatures who could no longer know a

woman's form but must run in dank dens, creatures unable

to make or appreciate the taste of wine or of a succulently

prepared roast."

"And you want me now to be a centaur."

"Yes. The oftener you change, the less chance you have

to be absorbed by any one particular mythical prototype.

And you, seeking some purpose beyond your human one,

are ripe for such an end as threatens you now."

"I can withstand the pressure."

"You can't," Kas said. He shook golden curls but of his

eyes. "You especially. All your life, just like Child, you

have relied heavily upon a mythological ill-logic to justify

your existence."

"Christian mythos," I corrected, wondering why I was

still trying to defend it.

"These are of the same level of value as the Christian

one. One will snare you as easily as the other. In all of

them, you will find the same simplicity and attractive lack

of complication as you found in Christianity's legends.

And you will never leave this place."

I thought, for the first time, of Melinda. I had been

forcing her and everything else out of my mind, refusing

to acknowledge her no-nonsense interviews in that other

world, her quick wit, and her supple and willing body.

Now they all rose and crowded into my consciousness at

the same moment, almost overwhelming me.

In time, as we stood there on the rolling earth under

the flat sky, listening to the sea, Kas said, "Will you?"

"What?"

"Change?"

"I guess... guess so."

"Soon, then."

I hesitated.

"Soon."

And I changed.

Together, we started off across the hilly land, galloping

under the steel blue of looming thunderhead clouds. My

own golden hair streamed behind me. My tail rode

straight out behind, fluttering in the fingers of the sea-

tinged air.

If anything, this was better than the form of a wolf,

carried more of a sense of freedom and delight.

Child was not to be found here, either. We searched

everywhere, including the flat white beach where the surf

curled. We trotted through the shushing foam of the sea,

kicking up shells and sending crabs in frantic flight. We left

our hoofprints in the sucking mud of the moors, in the rich

black earth of the grasslands, in the sand by the ocean.

Sure-footed, we climbed the few small peaks and surveyed

this sector of the world, looked for caves and came back

down again. In time, when it was apparent there was no

blue-floored room and no exit to Child's conscious mind,

we reached the curtain of mist to another climate, another

segment of the fractured reality that constituted Child's

mind.

I was forced to say goodbye to Kas the centaur, though

I longed to stay here and enjoy the horseman form a

while longer. He lectured me about disassociating from

my centaur form upon leaving this plane, and I listened

and made my promises.

In the next landscape, I returned to my human ana-

logue, though shedding the horseman form was painful and

filled me with a sad need to feel my hooves striking stone.

There was no life here to imitate, so I did not have to

worry about becoming inextricably meshed with a myth

figure. This was the land of the broken black mountains

which jagged up in slabs as big as houses, some even

larger than that, like a world of broken crockery and

shattered bottles. The sunlight was discolored by the re-

fracting stone and became a depressing brown. The air

was flat, as if it had been bottled for a long while, and no

breeze moved in it. There were no sounds, no movements.

The sky was an even, ugly yellow, like dark mustard, and

not a single cloud marked its expanse.

I walked forward.

The onyx rocks were smooth and cold against my bare

feet.

As I scrabbled up the terrain, my fingers squeaked on

the shiny surfaces. Those sounds seemed unendurably long

in the ghostly silence. I did not like this place at all,

wanted out of it as fast as I could move to the next veil of

mist. But it was here that I found Child, found the place

where he was trapped in his own madness....

IV

As I made my way over the ebony land, I reached a

chasm in the shattered rocks, perhaps a thousand yards

long and three yards wide at the top, narrowing to two

feet at the bottom. Down there, some three hundred feet

below, a soft blue light glowed. It seemed to be the gentle

blue of shallow water, but even this slight color branded

my eyes in contrast to the sameness of the terrain I had

been struggling across for some minutes.

I called down, listened to the flat echo, but received no

answer. If this was the place where Child waited, bound

by his own insanity, circled by unnamed demons, he was

unable to speak.

I swung over the jagged edge, looked to the bottom,

then grew wings like those I had seen on the batlike

creatures of the mountain. I descended gently, pulled the

wings in and absorbed them as the way grew too narrow

to glide. I dropped the last few feet onto the blue floor,

found it was made of ice.

To the right, the rock wall cut off three feet above the

ice, and the passage this created seemed to go on for some

distance. Lying on my stomach, I slid along the shimmering

ice; I was cold but not uncomfortable, exhilarated by the

freshness of the air here. A hundred feet further on, the

ceiling of black rock thrust suddenly upward, and I found

myself in a full-sized cavern where I could stand.

On my feet again, I crossed the barren room to the far

side where the ice-encrusted rock seemed to warp down-

ward. There, I discovered steps roughly chiseled in the ice.

I went down them, cautiously, eventually came out in a

shadowy chamber with another blue floor, though this one

was not empty: Child sat in the center of it in an ana-

logue version of his real body.

And...

And: the things crawled around him, circling in mind-

lessness, yet with a certain uncompromising evil that terri-

fied me even though I knew they could not do me any

physical harm. They were much like scorpions though

somewhat longer than a man's arm, with flared, knife-

edged carapaces shielding their backs, and twenty spindly

legs on either side. Their stinging tails forked at the end,

each of the two prongs tipped with a trio of wicked spurs

as long as my little finger and tapered to needle points.

They did riot look at me, nor did their sensory cilia, burst-

ing like whiskers around their beaked mouths, in any way

indicate that they realized my presence.

Their legs hissed on the ice, and their constant parade

had worn shallow grooves in the cold floor.

There were different numbers of them at different mo-

ments. Now there might be as few as a dozen describing

the wide circle—now a hundred of them, magically crys-

tallizing out of the crisp air—now thirty, now a dozen,

now two dozen. No matter how hard I looked, I could not

catch one of them appearing or disappearing, though their

numbers fluctuated with every passing second. I had the

feeling that I was in a funhouse where there was a compli-

cated array of trick mirrors and that there was actually but

one of these creatures whose presence was magnified to one

degree or another by ingenious, mirrored pyrotechnics.

"Child?" I called.

The withered dwarf paid no attention to me, but stared

with morbid fascination at the nightmarish scorpion

guards which kept him ringed in and obedient.

Since I had first been trapped in this subconscious

reality, I had not spared the time or the energy to consid-

er the reason and psychology behind many of the mental

analogues that constituted this inner universe. I had mere-

ly accepted and tried to deal with them, to search through

them for a way out, a way to freedom and my own body.

Now, as I watched the grisly parade before me, I began to

wonder what this collection of monsters was representa-

tive of. Why was Child's core of energy and intelligence

trapped in this place, bound to this single minim of his

entire subconscious universe? What were these scorpions

that surrounded him and maintained their constant, evil

vigil?

I examined them more closely and discovered that they

did not have that surface sheen of reality that the centaur

and the wolf had possessed. They shifted, as if they were

liquid, and fragments of thought associations whirled in-

side of them. It took only a moment to discover their true

nature.

Consider the human mind: three main parts to it: the

ego, the superego, and the id. The first is what we are and

what we have reached through the ordeals of life; the

second is what we think we are and what we attempt to

delude others into considering us as; the third is all the

things we want to be and do but which—either because of

public condemnation or a conflict with our own superegos

and guilt—we never dare consider. In the id, there are the

dark facets of our human soul, pieces of racial heritage

and other parts uniquely ours: blood lust and the desire to

rend flesh; sexual longings of grotesque sorts and on gro-

tesque scales; the urge to cannibalism, the hunger for the

taste of human meat We repress the id and most of us do

not even realize that it stirs within us like a worm in the

apple, so complete is our veil of civilization.

These scorpion-tailed monstrosities were Child's id lusts,

his ugly needs which he, like everyone, had always kept

repressed. It was impossible to say how they had gotten

free, how they had encircled him like this, but I ventured

a guess or two as I watched them clack horny mandibles

and lift rattling, bony legs. Perhaps, when he had consid-

ered himself the Second Coming, he had been unable

to pretend the id lusts did not exist. Perhaps, finally, in

order to continue thinking of himself as a deity, he had to

rip the id from the other parts of his mind, tear it free of

the ego and the superego. And now those lusts were

attempting to integrate themselves with his mind, to estab-

lish contact with the ethereal fragments of his thought

processes, where they belonged. Or perhaps the id had

been broken loose of the rest of his mind when he had

tipped into insanity. Either way, they had found him

again, and they had spell-bound him with their evil. He

held them off with his psychic energy, still unable to toler-

ate their being a part of him. (Did he still nurture the

Second-Coming fantasy—or perhaps some equal legend

from another mythology?)

"Child?" I asked again.

Again: no answer.

If I could free him, if only for a moment, could contact

him and jar him into a moment of sanity, perhaps I could

get him to open a way into his conscious mind, a path to

lead me out of his body. But as long as the scorpions were

there, as long as he was transfixed by the sight of these

lusts he had forgotten, I could not reach him.

For the third time since I had first entered his mind

that day so long ago, I fashioned a sword from the air, a

shimmering blue luminosity with a curving blade and a

hilt of dazzling light. Stepping forward, I hacked at the

first of the scorpions in my way, halved it. It vanished. I

turned to a second of them, tore it through, then swung

furiously, wading through the spinning members of the

huge creatures, destroying them as fast as the magic mir-

rors brought them to my attention.

Their sound was a screeching cacophony, and their

mandibles punctuated the wailing fury with a drumbeat of

irregular snapping, thrumming clacks against the ice floor.

I do not know how long the battle lasted. It seemed

that perhaps days passed, though there was no sunrise and

sunset down there—and I did not tire in my analogue

body, did not need to stop for food and drink. I was the

irresistible force, wading into the legs and tails and shining

carapaces. In time, the numbers of the scorpions began to

grow smaller, and at last the air refused to disgorge more

of them. I knew they were not gone forever, because they

were nothing more than psychic energy, and that could

never be truly destroyed. But by then, I would not care if

they encircled him.

Child still sat on the ice, staring where the scorpions

had marched but where there was now nothing but scored

ice. Approaching his analogue cautiously, I touched him,

hunkered before him.

"Child?"

Quiet.

"Child? Speak to me?"

He looked at me. He blinked his eyes. And then chaos

broke loose as his insanity boiled through the surface

tension of the analogue and swept over me!

I was swept up, up, on a tide of human flesh, of torn

arms and legs, of bleeding mouths, broken teeth, shattered

bones, burning flesh, splintered eyeballs. Monsters rose in

the swell and came toward me, lumbering ogres and swim-

ming reptilian horrors. The arms and mouths in the ocean

of human parts attacked me, grasped me and tried to pull

me down, bit me and chewed at my unreal psychic flesh.

I felt myself losing hold of my own equilibrium. In a

moment, I would spiral over the edge, into madness for

the second time. I had recovered only recently, and I

knew a second plunge to the bottom of that well would be

the last I would ever make. I would fall back into gibber-

ing incoherency, and I would remain there forever. Twice

mad is once too often, and the shores of detached logic

would never be available to me again.

The nearest ogre reached for me, with his seven-

fingered hands, each finger tipped with the fanged mouth

of a yellow-eyed snake.

I rolled across the rippling floor of human parts, kicking

pieces of bodies up as I went.

The snake fingers missed by inches.

A flurry of mutilated corpses clutched me and pulled

me under the surface of the sea.

I fought to air again, through nightmare conglomer-

ations of dead men and women,

"CHILD!" I screamed.

Another ogre thundered down on me.

In the last moment before I could be grasped and dis-

membered, I did the only thing that would save me. Giving

myself over to the basest of my id lusts, radiating blood-

hunger and sexual need of the vilest sort, I repelled the

ogres and the dragons, forced back the tide of human

bodies that tore at me. In seconds, I was back on the blue

ice floor where again the analogue of Child sat, tranced.

I circled him. Now I was in the form of one of the

great scorpion beasts, mandibles chattering, forked sting-

ing tail raised above my back, ready to attack.

His psychic energy formed a wall against me, but I

danced on, broached that wall with my own mind, and

leaped upon him, thrashing with him on the floor. This

time, rather than argue with him, rather than plead with

him, I devoured his psychic energy, destroyed him, ab-

sorbed him, and dissipated his shattered mind throughout

my own.

Child no longer existed. I had killed him. But now I was

in total control of his body. I left that place, made it

dissolve around me. I made the mountain appear, and I

climbed it, entered the caves through which I had first

come down into Child's subconscious mind. In moments, I

had freed myself, and was looking out at the world

through Child's eyes, encased, again, in real flesh....

THREE

The Incomplete

Creation...

I

I found myself in Child's body, lying in a hospital bed

with the barred sides raised to provide the illusion of a

prison. The room was a private one, somewhere far up in

the tower of Artificial Creation, no doubt. There was no

light but that from a small blue bulb plugged directly into

a floor socket. In that eerie glow, I could see that there

was no nurse in attendance. How long had Child lain like

this, dazed, almost comatose, unable to speak or see or

hear anything of the real world as his madness kept him

sealed in the analogue of his subconscious? Days or

weeks? Perhaps even years?

Somewhat frantic at that last thought, I pushed up,

weak and dizzy. My frail, bony arms felt as if they would

crack, but they got me to the edge of the bed just the

same. My short legs dangled a foot from the tiles after I

got the barred slats down, and that measly twelve inches

looked more like two or three miles. I built my courage,

dropped, felt skinny legs buckle. I crashed forward on my

face and lay there for a while, collecting my wits.

Was this what it was like for Child, this inability to

cope with the inadequacies of his own body, this helpless-

ness and dependence? No wonder his own search for a

purpose and identity had been so much more thorough

and extensive than my own.

I got on hands and knees and gripped the edge of the

bed for support, gained my feet again. The door was but a

dozen steps away. I toddled toward it, collapsed against it,

holding on to the knob to keep from taking another

serious fall.

Opening the door was a major chore, compounded by

the fact that I wanted to do it quietly. I didn't want

anyone to know that I was awake now and moving

around. First, I wanted to find out a few things, attempt

to discover how long I had been trapped in Child's mind.

And if I could somehow locate my own body—for, surely,

they were keeping it somewhere close at hand, in another

dark hospital room—and re-enter it before they were

aware I had returned, I would be in a better position to

take care of myself. I didn't trust Morsfagen or any other

super-patriot professional soldier. The more ignorant I

was about what had transpired since I had gone mad

within Child, the further removed I was from my own

body and, therefore, autonomy, the more power they

would hold over me, the more they could demand and

perpetrate.

The door finally opened and gave a view of an empty

corridor that was painted a flat, unreflective blue. I

stepped out of the room, closed the door, and hung by the

wall, breathing heavily and trying to ignore the pain in the

sunken chest of the mutant body which I inhabited.

I didn't care if I destroyed Child's body during this

trek, for I had already destroyed Child himself by absorb-

ing his psychic energy back there in that blue-floored room

beneath the broken, ebony plain. He would never own his

body again. I could feel his intellect, devoid of any person-

ality now, within my own mind, magnifying my intelligence

and perceptions. But that was the only minim of Child's

real self that would ever survive.

Pushing away from the wall, I started down the cor-

ridor. I could not expect it to remain empty for long, and

I would gain nothing by being seen here, before I had

learned anything of my situation. I weaved from wall to

wall, barely managing to keep my feet. And when the tall,

uniformed man appeared at the head of the stairwell and

shouted in surprise, I collapsed on my face....

When I woke, I was in the same hospital room, in the

same bed, with the metal slats raised around the sides to

keep me from falling out. There were differences, though.

There was plenty of light, and there was a nurse, a

buxom, gray-haired matron with a bland, pleasant face

and a concerned look plastered all over it. There was a

guard by the door, on the inside, his holster unsnapped.

Why I should be considered that much of a threat when I

could hardly even walk, I did not know. Morsfagen and a

white-smocked physician stood by the right side of my

bed, looking down at me. The physician exhibited concern

and professional interest. Morsfagen had a look of hatred

and sheer animal cunning.

"Welcome back," he said.

"I'm thirsty," I croaked, realizing for the first time how

parched my throat was.

The nurse brought me water, which I gulped eagerly.

The chips of ice rattled against my teeth, stung my gums.

But it was all quite good, better than expensive wine.

"No more water, no more anything until some questions

are answered," the general said.

"Yes," I replied.

"What has happened to Simeon Kelly?"

For a moment, I was surprised. Then I realized that

they had no way of knowing this wasn't Child who had

awakened. It meant that there were other things they

could not know, things which would give me the upper

hand.

"I am Kelly," I said.

"No games," he snapped.

"This isn't."

He looked at me closely. "Maybe you had better ex-

plain."

So I told him about Child's investigation into the nature

of God. He did not seem moved by the discovery that the

universe held no purpose, that God is insane and always

has been. Perhaps he did not believe me. I rather think

that was the case with the doctor and the nurse and the

guard by the door. But there was a crisp, cold gaze there

that said Morsfagen did believe—and not only that he

believed, but that he had come to the same conclusions

himself some time ago, though he had simply lacked the

proof that Child had managed to obtain. There was no

room for God in Morsfagen's life, I realized. He had

always operated outside a belief in heaven and hell and

retribution for sin.

I carefully avoided mentioning that I had absorbed

Child's energy, that he would never regain his body. If

they thought that all could soon be returned to normal,

they would be more eager to see me back in my own

flesh, wherever it was kept.

When I was done, I asked: "How much time has

passed?"

"A month," he said.

It was startling, yet it could have been worse. I had

steeled myself to accept the word "years," and this was a

blessing by comparison. A lot could have happened in a

month. But Melinda might still be free, might still be

waiting. Harry would be alive. My house would not have

been sold to creditors. Yes, there was still time to regain

normality.

"I want my own body," I said. That was the first step to

that normality.

"Perhaps," Morsfagen said.

I looked around at the others to see whether they

understood the cruelty in that tease. None of them seemed

to pay any attention. Perhaps part of their jobs included

paying no attention to such things.

"What is this—perhaps?" I asked.

Child's voice box made the words seem sinister when

they were actually spoken in fear.

"Perhaps," he said, his face impassive, "it would be

better for all of us if no one outside of this room ever

discovered that you have regained sanity and are ready to

return to your own body. It would be less trouble to get

you doing work for us. We would not have to pay you

anything. All in all, perhaps it would be a wise idea."

The nurse paid no attention. But her pleasant face

mirrored her tacit agreement with Morsfagen.

The doctor took my pulse, listened at my chest with a

stethoscope, checked my eyes and ears, ignoring what

transpired around him.

The guard, by the door, had Morsfagen's impassive

look.

I was alone.

Except for Child's intellect, which had expanded my

own. There was a cunning about me now that I had not

possessed before. Morsfagen would think he knew me:

fast on the cutting remarks, but low on cleverness. But

that had changed, and I was now every bit as devious as

he.

"One problem," I said.

"What's that?"

"I've told you that it took me this full month to shake

loose of my own madness and to free myself from Child's

insanity. I nearly lost my mind again trying to find a way

through his subconscious landscape. You scanning all this

so far?" He indicated that he was by saying nothing.

"Now, if I'm trapped in this frame, welded so closely to

his mind, I'm going to succumb to his insanity again—and

this time it will be permanent. I couldn't stand the ordeal

of recovery again." In that whispered, deathlike rattle of

Child's, the words took on even more sincerity than I had

tried to give them.

Morsfagen looked doubtful. It was almost as if he could

sense the change in me, sense the expanded awareness and

cunning. But he could not take the chance that I was not

telling him the truth, and he knew that I had won. He was

going to have to console himself with the fact that at least

he now had me in full mind for future use; if he tried to

play for full stakes and keep me locked in Child's body, he

might very well wind up with nothing. And military

careers are not built on blunders.

"Bring him along," he ordered the doctor. "We'll let

him have his body back." He smiled at me, but it was not

a pleasant smile. "But you'd better cooperate, Kelly. It's

time of war now, and that rules out your brand of

frivolity."

"I understand perfectly," I said, not without a touch of

sarcasm.

"I'm sure you do."

And he left the room.

Minutes later, they wheeled me into the corridor to

keep my rendezvous with my own coma-ridden flesh. . . .

All the while, I gloried in the thought that I was swiftly

getting the upper hand and that before they realized what

had happened, I would be in my former position of

dominance. There were two minds' worth of energy within

me, plus the complex intellect of Child now amplifying my

own. They were mere men, I told myself, and they stood

no chance at all.

I did not realize that I was making the same mistake

that I had made twice before. In the old days, I had

convinced myself that I was a god of sorts, the Second

Coming, and my life had been disastrous because of that

fantasy. In Child's subconscious, I had eagerly sought to

be transformed into the mythic images of Tibetan wolves,

into something transcending humanity, and that might

have cost me my mind and my eventual recovery. And

now, as I was wheeled down the corridor, I again looked at

myself as more than a man, as a minor god soon to prove

his power. Because I had never allowed myself to associ-

ate with "mere men," I did not understand them, or

myself. And my latest delusions of grandeur were bound

to lead to ultimate disaster....

And did...

II

My legs were cramped, and even a slight bit of move-

ment made my shoulders ache, for the staff had not been

exercising my body with the proper degree of enthusiasm

during the month it had been vacant. I felt weak, and my

stomach was a hard knot. Having been fed intravenously

for some four weeks, the stomach had shrunk and felt like

a clenched fist in there, squeezing my guts. Otherwise:

fine. And since it was such a delight to be housed in my

own flesh once again, I was willing to overlook the little

aches and pains of readjustment to life. I didn't complain,

and I tried not even to grimace.

Morsfagen seemed disappointed by that.

They wheeled Child's carcass out of the room. It would

continue to live, though it would never exhibit intelligence

again. It was a husk, nothing more. I still had not told

them, for I was still not free of the AC complex and out

of their immediate reach. Morsfagen would not take kind-

ly to such a trick, and I didn't want to be around whenev-

er he discovered it.

I showered, washed away the weeks of sickbed smell.

The hot water seemed to loosen my cramped muscles, and

dressing was only half the ordeal I had expected. When I

slipped into my jacket and checked my reflection in the

mirror, Morsfagen said, "Your shyster is waiting down-

stairs."

I held back the witty reply designed to demolish him,

for I knew that was exactly what he wanted. He was

searching for some reason to slap me down, either with

his fists or with a preventive detention arrest. Why we had

hit it off so miserably from the start, and why our hatred

for each other was now twice what it had been, I didn't

know. True, we were altogether different types, but the

antagonism we felt for each other was deeper and more

unremitting than a mere clash of personalities.

"Thank you," I said, leaving him with nothing to at-

tack. I walked to the door, opened it, and was halfway

into the corridor before he replied.

"You're welcome."

I turned and looked at him and saw that he was smiling,

that same cold smile of hatred which I had grown used to

by then. He had said "you're welcome," but not with any

seriousness—which meant that he understood me and knew

that I understood him too.

"We'll contact you day after tomorrow," he said.

"There's a lot of work to do. But, after what you've been

through, you deserve a little rest."

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome."

Again. And grinning this time too...

I closed the door and walked down the hall to the bank

of elevators with a dark-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot-four-

inch guard as company. We didn't say much of anything

to each other on our way downstairs, not so much out of

any particular dislike for each other as out of a sheer lack

of anything to say, like a nuclear physicist and an un-

educated carpenter at the same cocktail party, neither ex-

actly superior, but both separated by a mammoth com-

munications gap.

Down...

Harry was in the lobby, tearing his hat apart, and when

the elevator doors opened, he gave the thing a particularly

vicious mangling with his big hands and started toward us.

He was smiling the first genuine, friendly, uncomplicated

smile I had seen since I had awakened in Child's body. He

hugged me, living up to the image of the father figure, and

he had tears in his eyes which he could not manage to

conceal.

I was not concealing my own tears at all. I dearly loved

this clumsy, pudgy, sloppily dressed Irishman, though most

of my life had been spent in playing down that love. Maybe

it was because I had learned early to hate and despise as

self-protection. When Harry separated me from that world

inside the AC complex and showed me what actual love

was, I never lost my suspicion. And it is easier to act less

involved so that if you're hurt later, the anguish doesn't

show so much and give your adversary satisfaction. Now

unchecked, evidence of that love flowed.

We hurried across the lobby to the second elevator bank

and went down to the underground garage, where the

attendant brought Harry's hovercar, accepted a tip, and

stepped back as we drove out of that great, sparkling

building. In the street, we both sighed, as if some weight

had been lifted from us, and we began to talk for the first

time, out of the range of those microphones which infest

any government building.

"You'll tell me about it now," he said, his eyes flicking

from the shifting layers of new snow on the street to

where I sat against the far door. "They wouldn't let me up

to see you but once a week, you know."

"You'd only have been looking at flesh and blood," I

said. "All this time, I've been inside of Child, locked down

there in his mind."

"As I figured," he said. "But those"—he jerked his

thumb behind us, twisting his face up to look disgusted—

"those pretty boys in their uniforms, I just don't trust."

"They didn't exercise my body properly. And they

didn't take any precautions against stomach shrinkage.

Otherwise, I'm fine."

He snorted. "So tell me,"

"You first. I've spent a month in that place, and I don't

have the foggiest notion what has happened out here.

When I went in, war had all but been declared. The

Chinese and the Japanese had crossed the Soviet border,

maybe nuked a town...."

He looked grim, stared at the street unfolding before us

for a long time before he said anything. It was dark, and

the crisp blue arc lights sent fantastic shadows wriggling

between the heavy fall of snowflakes. The streets seemed

almost empty of traffic.

"War was declared two days later," he said.

"And we won?"

"Partly."

I looked around at the streets, all undamaged, all occu-

pied by our own troops, our own police. Indeed, I saw

now that the amount of occupation of our territory spelled

some sort of trouble. Every other street corner contained

coppers parked in squad-carrying howlers, surveying the

dark boulevard. They watched us go by with quick, dark

glances, though they offered no pursuit.

"Partly?" I asked.

As we flitted across the city, he summed up the de-

velopments of the month-long war:

The Chinese had indeed nuked Zavitaya, for there was

nothing there any longer but powdered stone, splintered

wood, and the ruins of a very few outlying structures. Of

the moderately large population, there were six hundred

survivors.

Belogorsk was taken, its laboratories seized and impressed

into the service of the People's Army of China—a euphe-

mism for the military strong-arm of the Peking dictator-

ship and its Japanese allies. Within a day, hover-trucks

had taxied Chinese troops into Svobodnyy and Shimano-

vsk, thereby effectively isolating one small sector of the

Soviet Union.

In this time, the Western Alliance had been making

preparations and issuing stern warnings to the Chinese,

who had ignored them imperiously, sparing no effort to

make it apparent that they considered the West with

scorn. The United Nations was petitioned by every

Western Alliance nation, and the world organization re-

plied by trade sanctions against China. These too were

laughed off. The land of the dragon was feeling its muscle

for the first time in many centuries, and its egotism threat-

ened to carry it to the brink of world destruction and

beyond. Yet the Alliance held off, well aware that the

electronic shield envisioned by Child and later torn from

Ms mind by my own extrasensory powers was reaching

midpoint in its hasty construction. There was no sense, the

strategists agreed, in helping to escalate a mini-war into a

major conflagration until our side was immune to attack

behind its shield generators and victory was assured the

West.

Two weeks after the start of the war, the Chinese were

still consolidating territorial gains, moving more troops

into the captured Russian territory. All the while, they

pointed to their Dragonfly and made lightly veiled threats.

They made false promises that this was all the land they

Wanted. And they followed such worthless assurances with

warnings that they could easily survive a nuclear-bacteri-

ological war, for their population was so much greater

than ours that it could not help but outlast us.

The Alliance, furious, bided time.

Then, unexpectedly, Japanese forces had landed on For-

mosa, coming in from the sea with destroyers and landing

craft. While the guns and the forces were aimed at China,

the back door was entered and the house secured by the

enemy. The Alliance forces quartered on that strategic

airbase were systematically slaughtered. Both the Chinese

and the Japanese denied having anything to do with it.

But reconnaissance planes reported Japanese ships, sans

the rising sun, harbored in the islands.

The following day, with even the peace criers united

behind the government, the crash force working to erect

electronic shields over all the strategic areas of the

Western Alliance, the last of the invisible shells of stretched

molecules in place and the generators backed with a

second set to prevent disaster, the Alliance declared war

on China and Japan.

We struck out with nuclear stockpiles at the major

industrial centers of both enemy nations. In hours, billions

in property and hundreds of thousands of lives were wiped

out in gushes of mile-high flame. The enemy was prepared

for this, and it retaliated with its own nuclear weaponry.

But the shields worked, the Alliance cities remained in-

tact. Again and again, the People's Army rained missiles

upon points in Russia, Europe, and North America. Not

one of them did damage. Since all sides had long ago, for

obvious strategic reasons concerned with occupying cap-

tured territory, gone to the construction of "clean"

bombs, even the spill radiation did not kill people living in

the countryside beyond the shelter of the unseen domes of

molecules which had been stretched to stunningly large

dimensions, their surface tension curiously increased and

not decreased by that expansion.

In desperation, plague drops were made on the cities of

the Alliance, but even these did not penetrate. In the

countryside, people died, but even many of these were

saved by immunization teams from the cities. Property

damage, at this point, was zero.

The Chinese nuked the small, unprotected towns in a

final spasm of fury, but they had little firepower left.

The Japanese had already surrendered in order to pro-

tect what little unmolested lands the home islands still

contained.

The Chinese command center was discovered at last,

destroyed with a vengeance, and the war brought to and

end. Or so everyone thought....

"Thought?" I asked.

"We have ambitious men for our military leaders,"

Harry explained. His tone was none too pleasant.

"Go on."

"We made a mistake with the voluntary, reformed

military service laws," he said.

"How so?"

"Try to envision these men, Sim. They're well-paid

professionals. There hasn't been a draft within the Al-

liance for twenty-four years. They enlist because they like

to be a part of a protective Big Brother sort of organization

—and because combat and planning for combat excites

them. We turned ourselves over to those who enjoy war,

and we gave them the machines to wage it. Now, with all

this hardware and all this education in the ways of dealing

death, they had had to sit through fourteen years of cold

war where guns were never fired. And before that, there

were two decades of total peace, where nations hardly even

exchanged angry words. They've never had the chance to

prove themselves, and since they are basically the sort of

men who need to prove themselves for their own benefit,

they've been driven up the wall by brinksmanship and

peace."

I felt ill, without exactly understanding why. The night

seemed darker and colder, and I had a sudden and furious

need for Melinda, for the touch of her and the warmth,

the seeking together and the final closeness. It was such an

intense desire that I grew dizzy with it.

"So?" I managed to ask.

"So, they didn't want to stop. They were moving, living

their dreams, and loving it. They were on the edge of the

thing they'd all fantasized about—conquering the world.

They could incorporate every nation into the Alliance, and

then it would be over. All the plans and subplans, plots

and counterplots and counter-counterplots came together

in a marvelous mosaic, and they just couldn't resist. China

was occupied, but the artillery was turned, next, on South

America."

"They're neutral!"

"Mostly," he agreed. "But the Alliance generals were

bothered by South America's autonomy, especially sines

Brazil had been making that space effort of theirs pay or!

with the mineral ships from Titan. The continent fell in

slightly less than a week—yesterday, to be exact. They

were either badly prepared militarily, or had oriented their

armies toward the exploration of space. They've come

under the banner of the Alliance—angrily, reluctantly, but

under it."

"And all the countries already in the Alliance—they all

went along with this?"

"Not all. But in Russia, the military had taken control

of the government years before. France and Italy

knuckled under to the popular sentiment of their people,

of the common man. Spain is a military nation to start

with—no problem there."

"But Britain and the U.S. wouldn't stand for it!" It

sounded false.

"Britain did refuse, said she wouldn't supply her own

men for the Alliance endeavor. But she gave tacit approv-

al by continuing trade and diplomatic relationships with

all her allies. She's too small to really buck them, and she

could only maintain her military's integrity, nothing more.

Canada did the same, though Quebec declared indepen-

dence and won it—or at least had the last time I heard—

and joined the militant ranks of the other Alliance na-

tions. As for us, the U.S., we were in it from the moment

the Soviet generals made the suggestion. The peace criers

were right all along: a volunteer army can become a

secondary government and can threaten the elected one if

the time is ripe. The coup came two mornings after the

Soviet proposal when it became obvious that the elected

government was not going to agree to a world-wide cam-

paign. We are now ruled by a police-army coalition, by a

council of eighteen generals and admirals, and the war—

meantime—goes on."

"Who now?"

"Australia," he said. "She has become self-sufficient,

which the Alliance military advisors never have appreci-

ated. Sydney was obliterated this afternoon and an ultima-

tum was delivered to the Australian government shortly

thereafter."

Neither of us spoke for a while.

The snow continued to fall, faster than ever.

"Dictatorship then?" I asked.

"They won't call it that."

"Nazism?"

"It's a mistake to apply the terms of other eras. The

same sense of chauvinism is there, and a roiling muck of

nationalistic fantasies. You can bet the Alliance factions

will break down in a monumental squabble once this war

is over. The Russians against us, a real Armageddon. They

have the taste of blood, and the old hates have been

resurrected on all sides."

"And nothing can be done?"

He didn't answer me, aware that it was an unanswer-

able question. He just drove and looked morose and con-

tributed to my flagging spirits.

This was the age of instant history. More could happen

in a week than happened in a year in the previous centu-

ry. Everything moved, relentlessly, determinedly, and we

were all caught up by it, swept along, either to be

drowned in the swell or carried to a foreign shore on the

wave crests.

I had a feeling I was going to be one of those to drown.

I was valuable to the war machinery. And even when the

war was over, I could serve the junta with my esp, help to

oppress those at home who would not appreciate the

beauty of a military nation. And I didn't know whether I

could do that, for I might be one of those rebelling

myself. All my life I had been floundering from one

emotional disaster to another, drawing in and in and in

upon myself. And then I had met Melinda, had been

treated by my Porter-Rainey Solid-State headshrinker, and

had opened myself to the world for the first time, had

tasted pure freedom and enjoyed it. The loss of my sanity

within Child's mind and the long attempt to get free of

him had interrupted my enjoyment of that new-found

peace. And now that I was back, now that Melinda and a

pleasant future lay within my grasp, the world was in the

hands of the madmen who threatened to tear it apart.

But I couldn't drown. I had to ride those wave crests,

had to survive to keep Melinda surviving. Damn them and

their bombs and their war lusts!

As we drove, I felt my rage grow, swell, encompass my

entire mind. And I realized that it would not be good

enough to ride those crests. At most, the two of us would

come out alive, washed ashore after the apocalypse, with

each other. But our world would be destroyed and useless,

and we would have no freedom, then, at all. Life would

be a constant battle for survival in a society thrown back

to barbarism. No, what I was going to have to do was

forget about riding the crests of the waves—and find some

way to direct the tides of the entire damn ocean of our

future!

"Not that I don't find your company perfectly marvel-

ous," I told Harry, "but could you take me to Melinda's

place instead of yours?"

He hesitated before he said it, but he said it just the

same. "She isn't at her place, Sim. She's been arrested.

She's a political prisoner."

It took long seconds for the words to sink in. When

they did, my rage became godly wrath, and I began to

seek someone upon whom to vent it. I was not afraid for

her safety. I basked in the certainty of my power. I still

did not see that I was bound up in the same flawed

philosophy that had brought me to ruin so many times

before....

III

I stood by the window of Harry's den, holding a glass

of brandy which I had not yet tasted. Beyond the win-

dow: a copse of trees, snow-covered grass, white-bearded

hedgerows. The stark, wintry vista matched my thoughts,

as I considered what Harry had told me on the way over.

Melinda had become engaged in writing pamphlets for

some revolutionary group and had been under surveil-

lance. Upon the magazine publication of the first part of

her biography of my life—the childhood years in the AC

complex—she had been arrested for questioning in con-

nection with the death of a copper and the destruction of

a howler some two weeks before. Whether there had been

any questioning or not, no one would know; she was still

under arrest.

The magazine article had not merely been a biography,

but had contained scorchingly anti-military, anti-AC anec-

dotes which neither of us had decided, before my en-

tombment in Child's mind, whether we should risk using

or not. She had risked it.

"When is the trial?" I asked him now. We had post-

poned further discussion until we were warm and com-

fortable in his den—at his insistence.

"A date has been docketed before the Military Court of

Emergency. Next September."

"Seven and a half months!" I turned from the window,

furious, slopping brandy over my wrist.

"When the act is labeled treason, there are laws that

permit it."

"What's her bail?" I asked.

"There is none."

"Is none?"

"What I said."

"But the law allows—"

He held up his pudgy hand to stop me. He looked

terrible, as if telling me this was worse on him than on

me. "This is no longer a republic, remember. It is a

military state where men like the junta councilmen decide

what laws there shall be. For sedition, they now say, there

is no bail, and the rule of preventive detention has been

extended indefinitely."

"Fight them!" I bellowed. "You fought them for me

when——"

"It's different now," he interrupted. "You still don't

grasp the situation. I worked the law on them before to get

you free. But now they are the law and they can change it

to counter one. It's like dancing on quicksand."

I took a chair, and again I was afraid, just a little, down

deep where it hardly showed. This was beginning to feel

like the inner world of Child's mind, where everything was

solid and tangible, but where nothing could be trusted,

where solidity could disappear, where liquid could become

solid ground beneath the feet.

"She's not the only one," he said, as if mass suffering

made her individual plight less important. It only made it

more important.

"Let me have the phone," I said, reaching for it.

"Who?"

"Morsfagen."

"This might be a mistake."

"If the sonofabitch wants my esp, wants my work, then

he is just going to have to see that she gets out of the

Tombs!"

I found the number in Harry's private directory of

unlisted phones, dialed it, and waited while a soldier called

a noncom to the phone—while the noncom went and got

a major who stuttered—and while the major finally went

and summoned Morsfagen.

"What is it?" he asked. Cold. Deadly. Forceful. The

sound of the well-trained bill collector.

"There's a girl being kept in the Tombs, charged with

sedition, for god knows what reason. She——"

"Melinda Thauser," he said, cutting me short. He

seemed to enjoy that. Like putting thumbscrews on me.

"I see you're up on things all around. Well, catch this,

then. I want her released, and I want all charges dropped

against her."

"That's beyond my control," he said—he did.

"It better not be."

"It is."

"It better not be, because you've just lost yourself an

esper if it is."

"Services that can be commandeered in time of war—

like an esper's services—are never lost," he said. Color

him infuriatingly calm, cool, and collected. I wanted to

kick his damned teeth in. He probably would still have

smiled at me with that smile.

"Services cannot be commandeered unless the crafts-

man can be found," I said.

"Is this a threat to withhold services from the govern-

ment in a time of national crisis?" he asked, smiling

through every word. Snapping turtle mouth there, looking

for one of my incautious fingers.

"Look," I said, trying another tack, "suppose we let the

charges ride for the time being. Suppose the only thing

that you concede is the bail. A low bail, but she'll still

stand trial."

"Out of my control," he said again. But the tone of his

voice said that nothing was ever out of his control.

"Like hell!"

"I'm not on the junta, you know."

"Look, Morsfagen, suppose she also destroys the damn

book. Now it's the book she's in trouble for, isn't it? The

first part of it?"

"With or without the book," he said, "the trouble re-

mains for us. The danger does not lie within the printed

page, but within the mind of the man setting words to

paper. Or woman, as the case may be. But there isn't any

use discussing it. I haven't any say about it. Besides, I've

seen her picture, and I'm certain you can wait seven

months for that kind of stuff." Voice of the obscene tele-

phone caller, yet still authoritarian. In the back of his

throat: unvoiced laughter that will explode when I hang

up.

"I know why you're in the military now," I said, my

voice deceptively neutral.

"Why is that?" he asked, walking into it.

"When your own manhood is negligible, a gun must at

least be a little consolation." And I hung up on the creep.

"That was definitely a mistake," my mentor said.

I picked my coat up and worked into it. "Maybe."

"No maybe about it. Where are you going now?"

"Home, pack some things, and get out. Look, I'll get a

message to you so you'll know where I'm at. Wait. Scratch

that. I've got a key to Melinda's apartment. If it's still

unoccupied, I'll stay there. They'll check hotels right

away, so maybe her place is safer. Maybe I'm not as

potent a wedge as I think I am. Maybe they really don't

need my esp. But I rather think they'll come crawling

after a while; it's the only way I can help her."

"You love her?" he asked.

I nodded. I couldn't really say it. Maybe it was still a

hangover from my delusions of godhood. Or maybe I was

just afraid that her affection did not run as deep as mine.

Perhaps, in a month, she had forgotten me.

"Then hurry," he said. "You might not have much

time."

I left his Tudor home under the trees, took one of his

two hovercars, and pressed the accelerator half through

the floor on the way home. The craft veered from one

side of the road to the other as clouds of snow kicked up

and stuttered through the blades of the air cushion

mechanism, but I didn't hit anyone.

Perhaps the sole reason for Melinda's arrest was her own

actions. But I thought not. It seemed too clever a hook in

my side to hold me should I ever return from the no-

man's-land inside of Child. Melinda was the perfect in-

surance policy, they must have thought, against my temper

and foolishness.

I parked the car on my patio and entered the house

through the double glass doors, packed two suitcases, and

folded the healthy amount of cash in my library lockbox

into five different wads in five different pockets. It was all

in Western Alliance poscreds, so the rise or fall of any one

government could not much affect its value. I took two

game pistols out of the collection in the shooting range

downstairs, grabbed a box of ammunition for each, and

put everything in the car.

As I drove off the patio and down the lane alongside

the cliff which overlooks my segment of the Atlantic

Ocean, the police made their appearance. At the foot of

the drive, eight hundred feet below, a howler pulled into

sight, lumbering upward in all its armored glory.

IV

I stopped the hovercar and watched the approaching

vehicles, three in all: the howler which I had first seen, a

crimelab truck full of detection equipment (though what

they hoped to find here, I could not guess), and a regular

patrol car with two plainclothesmen inside. They were

sending heavy guns for a single man, and they had not

wasted any time about it. I looked across the road at the

woods, the sloping hill leading to other houses in the de-

velopment, and knew the hovercar would never hold up

on that terrain. The beaters need an even surface to work

on. In hilly country, the four heavy blades would chew

through a rise in the land, twist, slice up through the floor

of the cabin and make it nasty for me, to say the least.

And if I went back, there was only my house to take

refuge in, for that was at the top of the cliff, with no road

down the other side. I had paid for isolation, and now it

was working against me.

The howler siren came on, as if I had not seen the

damn thing and didn't understand its purpose. It was no

more than three hundred feet away now, its great blades

setting up secondary air currents which were beginning to

rock my own hovercar.

Morsfagen was taking no chances. If I was under house

arrest, locked up in the AC complex, there was no doubt

that I would work for them, and there was no chance that

I could stir up any sort of hornet's nest about Melinda

Thauser. Perhaps it was the general himself in the last

vehicle, come to smile that smile of his while they loaded

me into the howler and took me quietly away.

But, bullheaded as I am, I was not about to make it

that easy for them.

Call me heroic. Call me daring. Call me adventurous

and devil-may-care. Actually, what I called myself at the

time, under my breath, was "fool" and "congenital idiot"

and "raving madman," but that is neither here nor there.

Turning the hovercar sideways to the lumbering howler,

I backed across the narrow lane, aimed the nose of my

craft at the brink of the cliff. For a moment, I almost lost

my nerve, but my insanity (or heroism, if you will) took

hold again, and I tramped the accelerator to the floor.

The drifting craft whined pitifully, shuddered as the

blades roared with the flush of power. Then the hesitation

was replaced by a burst of power, and the little car shot

forward at top rev, cleared the edge of the cliff, and hung

three hundred feet over the beach, a piece of delicate

dandelion fluff—which turned abruptly into a lump of lead

and dropped down, down, down like a goddamned stone.

I kept the accelerator to the floor, building a solid air

cushion beneath. But I held the horizontal controls back

against full stop so that none of the power could be used

to drive the craft forward or backward—it all went

straight down. The car pitched and yawed, but I pumped

the correction pedal furiously, compensating for that.

The white sand rose, as if the beach moved while I

hung in the same spot. If I had tried this maneuver a

hundred feet closer to the house, there would not have

been beach below, but great, shattered boulders. And the

story would have ended much differently indeed.

The last thirty feet, the building column of air under

the car began to slow me. I braced myself for the jolt of

contact, and hoped the blades would not be damaged too

much. Then the rubber rim of the oval vehicle slewed into

the sand, the blades whirled frantically and bit through the

grainy earth. Showers of sand exploded into the air, blinded

me on all sides with a white, rattling curtain. Then the

blades kicked the craft off the earth and held it ten feet

above, whirling madly. There was a ratcheting noise some-

where below, but it could not be that serious if the car

still flitted and if I were still alive. I cut back on acceler-

ation, and settled down to two feet above the flat beach.

Taking the car out next to the curling waves that

foamed along the snow-layered shore, I looked up at the

cliff to see what was transpiring there—and was just in

time to watch the howler leap into the air in a blind rush

to follow me.

Take a howler: five tons of armored vehicle; made to

ram through walls if necessary, with huge blades that rev

four times faster than a small car's blades ever can; extra

compressed air jets placed around the rubber landing rim

to add extra boost if the time should come when they are

needed. Like now. And howlers make leaps off ten-foot

embankments all the time when in pursuit of a man on

foot or on a wheeled vehicle like a motorcycle. But

ten-foot embankments in no way resemble three-hundred-

foot cliffs. If my car had dropped like a stone, the huge

howler fell like a mountain.

In three hundred feet, it was building so much speed

and force that the blades at full and the compressed air

jetting wildly would do nothing to stop its descent. I could

see the drivers coming to the same conclusion. Behind the

armored glass windscreen, they were screaming.

The fall seemed to take forever, though it could only

have been seconds. The boom of the mammoth blades

smashed along the cliff and cracked out across the sea like

cannon volley. The compressed air jets whooshed with a

decibel range that threatened to crack even the safety

glass in the windows of my hovercar. I didn't want to see

what was going to happen, but I could not take my eyes

off that fascinating descent no matter how much I wanted

to.

Down...

And down...

Sand exploded  upward  as  the howler reached the

beach.

But the thing wasn't slowed.

It struck the earth with a terrifying explosion of sound,

with a screech of metal shredding, twisting, buckling in

upon itself. The cab snapped off the cargo hold, leaped

toward the water, plowed into the sand at more than forty

miles an hour, carrying the dead drivers. It bulled its way

thirty feet into the sea before coming awash in the water.

At the point of impact, the gas tank under the cargo

section had split and the leaking fluid had touched some

hot parts. There was a whoosh of red and yellow, and

flames spiraled a hundred feet in that first moment of

ignition. On the sand, coppers and parts of coppers who

had been riding in the rear of the howler lay everywhere,

burning as the fuel washed them and ignited on them.

They were all dead already anyway, from the terrific

impact of the crash.

Overhead, the crimelab truck and the hovercar perched

by the edge of the cliff, their occupants looking down and

gesticulating. None of them seemed interested in coming

down, though the car with the plainclothes agents would

have had every bit as good a chance of making it as I had

had, even if that chance was not really so good at all.

The howler's descent, however, had been a good object

lesson and the point had sunk in instantaneously.

I turned the car along the beach in the direction of the

city, where I knew I could regain the highway before

long.

In a very few minutes, they would have an alert out for

me. I drove fast and tried to forget that war makes killers

of all men, whether directly or indirectly. For isn't it true

that every citizen who roots for "our side" to "kill the

gooks" is as responsible for every death as the man wield-

ing the gun? Isn't it true that none of us can escape re-

sponsibility for the madness of our species? Even those of

us who live in carefully constructed shells, even we con-

stantly affect the lives of others for evil. Existentialism?

Maybe. But there on the afternoon beach, it helped me to

recover my wits as I sped away from the flaming corpses

behind.

As I drove, I grew more and more infuriated with

myself, for I had been so smug about dealing with them—

and yet I had not put any of that sense of assurance to

work for me. It was time to stop feeling sorry for myself,

time to make my anger into something more formidable

than emotion.

I was superman, and it was time to act like one.

Or so I thought and so it seemed to be....

V

In the large apartment complexes such as the one in

which Melinda maintained her home, there is every conve-

nience of modern living that one could wish for—all

under a single roof. There are supermarkets and there are

special "ethnic" food centers; there are clothing stores and

beauty salons, bookstores and theaters, garages for hover-

cars and banks for money, bars for drinking and restau-

rants for nights out of the kitchen, office supply stores and

car shops, electricians and plumbers and carpenters, legal

prostitutes and drugbars for the purchase of approved

chemical stimulants.

To connect all these facilities and to make them all

accessible in minutes from every reach of the three-block-

square structure (and when you consider that with eighty

floors and nine square blocks per floor, there are 720

square blocks, you can easily envision how distant some

points of the complex can be from others), there is a

maze of express elevators, slow elevators, descending and

ascending escalators, horizontal pedways with belts mov-

ing at a variety of speeds, and stairs—though very few of

the last. Near any of the main shopping plazas within the

structure, one needs only to stand close to any wall to

hear the thrumming arteries of transportation moving

ceaselessly, efficiently, like blood behind the plastic and

the plaster.

It is possible to live in one such complex without ever

finding the need to leave for wider spaces. If the urge to

divorce oneself from civilization and its mad pace be-

comes too urgent, there are the underground parks with

false sunlight and real trees and four floors of convoluted

paths and bubbling, fresh brooks. There are butterflies and

small animals and birds. If one happens to be a sports

aficionado, there are arenas where various games are

played out weekly. Some housewives who seek no career

beyond that of running their home may be married in the

complex church, return from a honeymoon, and perhaps

live the next ten years in eighty floors, each nine square

blocks. Husbands who work at stores within the complex

and not at professions that take them into other parts of

the city, may spend an equal length of time without ever

seeing the real sky and the real world except through their

windows—which usually exhibit other apartment com-

plexes built nearby.

And no one seems to mind.

In fact, this sort of existence is advertised as a blessing,

as something all of us should desire.

For instance:

Crime, the realtors point out, is all but nonexistent

within the confines of the apartment area. All corridors

are monitored by a full-time staff of police from central

scanning depots within the structure. Anyone bent on

illegal activity against the residents would find that it is

utterly impossible to get into the complex without a plastic

identicard full of computer nodes which activate the auto-

matically locked doors. And only residents are carefully

screened guests may have the use of such cards. Since

everyone with a card has his fingerprints, retinal pattern,

blood type, odor index, hair type, and encephalographic

readouts on file with the structure's police bureau, it is

difficult, if not impossible, to commit a crime from within

and escape detection and retribution. Compared to the

outside world, with its juvenile gangs, organized rackets,

and political dissidents, such a style of crime-free living is

quietly attractive.

Pollution, the same realtors say, is a serious problem

outside the complexes. Man never really seriously stopped

fouling his air and his water until the early 1980s. Then,

some of the European and Asian countries had still not

seen the light. Pollution had not totally ceased until the

mid 1990s, after the complexes were being built. Outside,

the air had still not been purified. The death rate for lung

cancer, beyond the complex walls, among those unfortu-

nate enough not to have seen the wisdom of such compact

mini-cities, was three times that for complex dwellers. The

same for all respiratory diseases. The realtors could go on

and on. And they often did. The complexes had elaborate

filtration systems, and this selling point was never over-

looked.

Inflation, the salesmen will tell you, is far less noticeable

in a complex apartment, for the companies who own the

mammoth structures also do the buying from the smaller

stores within. A company owning a hundred complexes,

buying for a thousand grocery stores and hundreds of

thousands of citizens can obtain lower wholesale rates and

pass the savings on to the residents.

A community sense of togetherness, the realtors insist,

has all but died in the regular life style, in the cities and

the suburbs. There, they say with great sincerity, there is a

dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself attitude. In the great

complexes, this is not so. There is a camaraderie, a sense

of group achievement, a community pride and identity

that makes life more like it used to be: "Back When." No

man need be an island, but a part of a great continent.

Trumpets. Drums. End of the ad.

Why don't I live in one, then? Why build a house by the

sea, set in its own isolation of pine trees? Well, there are

lots of reasons.

For instance:

Crime, it seems to me, is nothing more than a necessary

evil, an offshoot of freedom and liberty. When you give a

man a list of rights, things that he should expect to be able

to do according to his standing as a member in the human

community, you are providing the unscrupulous man with

a list to stretch to his own ends. You are giving the clever

man something to look over in search of loopholes. And, in

the end, you have criminals making the free-enterprise

system work for them, their way, as they understand it. So

you arrest them and you punish them, but you learn to

live with them. Unless you would prefer restricting those

liberties everyone enjoys. You could shorten the list of

rights or do away with it altogether, thus giving the

unscrupulous ones less to stretch, less things to find

loopholes in. Everyone suffers, of course, when the list is

destroyed. And the cleverest and most intelligent of the

unscrupulous manage to end up at the top of the pile

anyway—or maybe they were the ones who eliminated the

list of rights to begin with, in order to cut down on

competition from amateurish punks. They call themselves

"city government" and steal legally. And with their sur-

veillance of the corridors, their bugging of elevators and

escalators and pedways and stairs, their files on every resi-

dent, which grow thicker with data each year, the apart-

ment complexes do not foster liberty, but slowly absorb it

from their residents.

Pollution? Well, maybe I'll die of lung cancer sooner

than a complex dweller. But I can breathe the smell of the

sea, the smell of wet earth after a rain, the ozone pro-

duced by lightning. My air has not been so filtered and

cleaned as to become flat and unexciting.

Inflation? Perhaps things are cheaper in the complexes,

and perhaps that's because the companies really want to

give their residents a fair shake in every way possible. But

there is something frightening, to me at least, about depend-

ing on one conglomerate entity for your food, your drink,

your entertainment, your clothing, your necessities, and

your luxuries. I stopped being dependent on Harry, my

father image, by the time I was halfway through adoles-

cence. I don't yearn to be fathered or mothered to death by

some team of accountants and cost-projecting computers.

A community sense of togetherness, they say, makes life

much more fun in the giant apartment structures. But I

don't want to have to be friends with anyone merely

because I happen to live near them. I don't enjoy the high

school rah-rah, go-team unison of small minds or the

brittle-fingered canasta desperation of old people seeking

companionship in their last days. Besides, last night, I saw

an example of that community togetherness which banded

the "innocent" citizens of that complex .across the street

into a spying, ruthless creature which could report neigh-

bors to the police to have them slaughtered. Community

togetherness can lead to a consensus outlook that seeks and

destroys any dissident element, no matter how small and

really harmless.

Thanks but no thanks.

I'll take my sea.

And my pine trees.

And even my damned polluted air.

Her apartment was as it had been. It did not look as if

it had even been searched—a strange fact if they truly

had thought her involved with revolutionary elements. I

got some food in a plaza supermarket and returned to her

place, fixed myself a solid meal, and ate until my shriveled

stomach was somewhat back to normal size.

After that, I turned on the television and was instantly

glad I had taken so many precautions getting here. I had

driven to the airport, abandoned my hovercar, and had

brought my luggage back here on a bus. If I had not been

so quick and careful, I might now be jailed, for I was a

television star it seemed, my face a portrait on the wide-

angle tube.

On the news, they showed coppers at my house, looking

busy as they attended complex machinery. They found

signs of traitorous activities—signs which they had planted

since my escape. They had uncovered a "secret room" and

such nefarious things as a photo-printer and stacks of anti-

Alliance, anti-military booklets I was alleged to have

written with—they pointed out—the aid of Melinda Thaus-

er, who had already been taken into custody. There were

even weapons caches and a small bomb assembly bench. I

was wanted on a warrant for sedition. Very neat indeed.

But there was another warrant as well.

The second one was for murder.

They exhibited, in ludicrous detail, the demolished

howler at the foot of the cliff, the charred corpses of the

men who had been riding in the back of it. They had

fished the detached cab from the sea, and the drivers were

laid side by side, horribly mutilated by the broken wind-

screen and the crumpled roof of their vehicle. According

to the news, I had run the howler off the narrow cliff

road. I had charged it directly, and when it was obvious I

was going to hit them, the drivers of the mammoth rig

had swerved off the road to avoid killing me. Quite gallant

of them.

I waited for the reporter to say how I had managed to

make my escape with still another cop car ahead of me,

but he talked around it without letting the home audience

in on the way I had dived over the cliff myself.

KELLY KILLER, COPS SAY! That was the headline

the papers would carry, surely. Those boys always went for

alliteration.

I spent most of the evening working over a plan in my

head. Just remaining on the loose did not seem enough,

any longer, not while Melinda was in the women's quar-

ters of the Tombs, down there in dark, cold stones with-

out me.

Somewhere around nine in the evening, my thinking

was interrupted by the whine of sirens and the sinister

rattle of gunfire.

I stood, listening intently, wondering if they were now

surrounding the building, now getting wise to my sudden

disappearance. But they would hardly be firing out in the

streets. And there would be no need for sirens. Indeed,

sirens would warn me, and such a building as this

provided a great many hiding places.

Turning to the broad picture window, I looked down

into the street eight floors below. Three howlers curbed in

front of the building across the street, and uniformed

coppers poured out of them like insects from a broken

hive. From the fourth floor of that building, a number of

men opened fire with small arms, pitifully insufficient

against such organized and deadly police.

What followed was a bloody, desperate battle which car-

ried no reason nor purpose to it, so far as I could see.

Obviously, the people on the fourth floor were considered

enemies of the state, for there was also an army car down

there, with what appeared to be high brass directing the

operation. But why tear gas was not used, why bullets were

chosen instead, I could not understand.

I watched, terrified and fascinated.

In the end, as those on the fourth floor surrendered,

tossing guns and ammunition down to the street, the most

chilling scene of all occurred. Searchlights now illuminated

the rooms beyond the shattered fourth-floor windows,

showed the men and women there, dejected and defeated.

Almost simultaneously, the inside doors to the building's

corridors burst open, and uniformed coppers stepped into

the rooms. They carried what appeared to be machine

pistols, and they used them expertly, slaughtering the

thirty or so human beings who had already surrendered. A

tall, willowy blonde twirled gracefully and fell across the

windowsill. Her long fingers scrabbled at the wooden

frame, while her mouth went slack and her face contorted

hideously with the knowledge of impending death. Anoth-

er eruption of gunfire behind her sent her lunging through

the window, tearing her arms on projections of broken

glass. She tumbled sixty feet to the street, turning lazily, her

waist-long yellow hair sprayed around her like a halo ...

At last I turned away from the window.

What I had just seen was a sample of that "community

camaraderie" the real estate agents spoke of. The neigh-

bors of those dead men and women had turned them in,

surely, in righteous indignation that a cell of revolutionaries

should exist in their building.

The consensus had killed them as surely as the bullets.

The consensus, I would have to soon learn, was a living,

breathing creature that could attack in vicious rage.

And the molders of the consensus had Melinda in a cell

where they could get to her at any moment....

VI

At a quarter to three in the morning, after a short nap

and a quick snack of cheese and crackers, I dressed and

slipped both loaded pistols into the pockets of the heavy

coat I was wearing. Through a series of pedways, escala-

tors, and elevators, I reached the ground level of the west

wall of the apartment complex and went outside. For a

moment, I savored the cool air, then turned right and

walked briskly toward the center of the city. I held my

chin high and made my step firm but not rushed. I tried to

look as little like a fugitive as possible. In ten minutes, I

passed a dozen other pedestrians without getting a second

glance from any of them, and I thought the ruse was

working.

Twenty-five minutes from her apartment complex, the

squat, round surface portion of the Tombs hove into sight.

This was the administrative wing, containing offices and

files. Light burned in some of the long, narrow window

slits. Below this modest and attractive nubbins, bored for

dozens of levels into the earth, were the cells and the

interrogation chambers. The place had been designed,

originally, as a modern progressive prison. But slowly,

through the years since the cold war had been renewed, it

was converted into something quite less than progressive by

those reactionaries who branded change as part of any

enemy plot, labeled disagreement as subversion. The ideal

of rehabilitation was abandoned by those who thought

punishment was better than converting to usefulness. Frus-

tration and boredom and rage were the companions of

those locked within these walls.

And Melinda was there now.

There were three howlers parked along the curb, all of

them empty and locked. At the four corners of the inter-

section, there were piles of snow which had not yet been

removed. Streetlights threw long shadows against the cir-

cular structure. There was no other person in sight, and the

scene was almost like still-life painting into which I had

walked through some unknown magic.

I had both guns shoved into my overcoat pockets,

though I prayed to an insane and unheeding God that I

would not have to use them. Indeed, I didn't think I could

use them if the occasion arose. But, clutched in my hands,

they gave me a sense of determination, as the dying

Catholic must feel when his fingers grip his crucifix and he

doesn't feel so bad about meeting the end.

Stepping from the curb, I crossed the icy street toward

the main entrance of the building.

The doors opened and two coppers came out, walked to

the last of the three howlers, and got in.

I kept moving. Up on the other curb, across the side-

walk, up the long flight of gray steps, my heart pounding

and my mouth dry. I pushed through the double doors

into the well-lighted lobby of the place, took it all in as I

walked across it, went down the main corridor to the

elevator, which I took down to the cell levels. The doors

opened on a guard sitting at a desk, and I received my

first challenge.

"Yeah?" he asked, looking up from the magazine of

undressed girls and overdressed fiction.

I probed out, struck into the center of his mind, fishing

through the currents of thoughts there, seeking the frag-

ments of scenery from his past and from the future he

imagined for himself. I had not done this thing since I had

been a child in the AC complex and they had made me do

it in experiments. It was distasteful and painful, to me as

well as to my victim. But I found the worst of his

thoughts, the deepest id dreams which would horrify him

and which would make him cringe with shame. The one I

chose was of him and his eleven-year-old sister—a whip

and a chain and all the horrors of sexual perversion those

symbols represented. And I pushed them up into his con-

scious mind with such force that they became reality for

him, so that he lost sight of me for only a split second and

fell back, reeling, under the force of the ugliness which

had welled up from the center of him.

Then I got out of there.

He was bent over the desk, clutching the corner of it,

gagging, shaking his head, moaning to dispel the vision

which he refused to believe could be his. I stepped for-

ward, producing a pistol from my pocket, and struck him

across the side of the head. He went down, hard, and

stayed there. I wrestled him behind the desk, took off his

jacket, ripped the arms loose, tied his ankles and wrists. I

stuffed his handkerchief in his mouth, rolled the bulk of the

jacket up, and tied the handkerchief in place.

And then I took his keys and opened the prisoner file,

found her cell number. It was eight floors further down.

Committed to this insanity now, I used another of his keys

to open the restricted elevator which led to the lower

levels. I went down.

When the elevator doors opened again, there was an-

other guard waiting, though this one was more alert than

the first. He looked at me and saw that I had not come

with an escort, even though I was obviously not a regular

traveler in these halls. He unsnapped his holster with a

clean, swift move, slipped fingers over the butt of his gun

with the reactions of a trained fighter.

I pried open his mind and found his id.

I wallowed in it.

I dredged up a vision of his own basic blood lust, a

gruesome, mad match that even he would never have

known existed inside him. It involved his unvoiced, unreal-

ized, unknown desire to—as an adolescent boy—rise up in

the middle of the night and slaughter both his parents in

their bed. There were spraying blood, harsh and strangled

screams, terrified faces of two gentle people, the boy's

hands wielding an ax whose blade gleamed wickedly in the

thin light which streamed through the bedroom window

from the iron street lamp beyond. . . .

When I got out of his head, he had dropped his pistol

and had turned to the wall, where, screaming, spitting, on

the verge of losing his sanity, he smashed his fists into

unyielding, gray concrete. I clubbed him mercifully with

one of my pistols. The vision would not return when he

woke, and he would probably not even remember what

had given him his fit. But knowing that didn't make me

feel any more heroic.

When he was tied and gagged, I took the cell block keys

from the desk and went after Melinda.

She was sitting in her cell; her reading lamp was on,

and she was absorbed in some propaganda literature she

was permitted to read. I rattled the key in the lock and

swung the door open before she looked up. When she saw

it was me, she let her mouth hang loose some while before

closing it and taking a much needed breath.

"If I'm interrupting a good book, I'll come back later,"

I said, nodding at the propaganda.

She threw it down. "That drivel is really fascinating,"

she said. "The guy who writes it is either the biggest con

man in existence or he believes it himself—in which case

he has to be a mongoloid idiot, no question."

"Aren't you glad to see me?" I asked. "Aren't you going

to hug and kiss the hero in your midst?"

"You can't be in my midst, because I'm only one

person, not a multitude. Though this goddamned prison

baggies do make me look like more than one woman."

She pulled at the uniform, shrugged. "You're here. I never

expected you, don't know how you managed it, and doubt

if we'll get back out. Like I said, the prison baggies

here...."

I pulled jeans, sweater, and thin windbreaker from

under my overcoat, all of which I had secreted there

before leaving her apartment. "Do me the honor of a

striptease?" I asked.

She grinned, stripped without asking me to turn my

back (which I would have refused to do anyway), and

dressed in the clothes I had brought.

I felt every inch the hero, all the while my mind was

yelling "Fool" at top volume.

As she pushed past me to leave the cell, she stood on

her toes a moment and kissed me, then turned quickly

away again. Before she could take two steps, I grabbed

her and turned her around. What I thought I had seen was

in her eyes: tears.

"Hey," I said, feeling the male stupidity that cannot

cope with tears. "Hey." Really stupid.

"Let's go," she said.

"Something wrong?"

"I've been wondering if you were alive, wondering if

even you were whether you would care enough to come

for me."

"But of course—"

"Shush," she said, stopping the tears. "We haven't time

for this, have we?"

We closed the cell door and locked it, went up and past

the other cubbyholes. Each was separated from the other

by cement walls, but the fronts were all bars through

which we could see the occupants. None of them, howev-

er, seemed to care much about us.

We went up in the first elevator, passed the first and

second unconscious guards. When the second elevator

opened on the main ground floor corridor, we walked

briskly into the lobby, pushed open the glass doors and

breathed in the cold night air. No one in the lobby or at

any of the work desks paid the least bit attention to us. I

took Melinda's arm, and we walked down the steps—

—just in time to confront General Alexander Morsfagen

and four young and dedicated men with guns in their

hands!

"Good evening," he said, bowing to us.

The four men with guns did not bow.

"I do believe you're surprised, Mr. Kelly. I didn't ex-

pect to see your cool broken like that." But whether or

not he expected it, he certainly did enjoy it. His face was

split with a grin you seldom see outside of mental wards.

"Who is he?" Melinda asked.

"Morsfagen."

"The title too, please," he said. But he was not just

being humorous. His voice was stiff and deadly beneath

the surface delight.

"General Morsfagen," I told her.

"And you're under arrest, of course," he said.

The four guards advanced on us, efficient but somehow

less wary than they had been at first. It would have been

possible, perhaps, to use my two pistols on the lot of

them. They did not seem to expect that I might be armed,

and with both my hands in my pockets and wrapped

around the sweat-slicked butts of the weapons, they might

have bought it but good before they realized what was

happening.

Might have.

But nothing is certain.

Besides, the back of my mind played with the memory

of those flaming corpses on the beach, with the picture of

the howler drivers screaming as they fell to sudden death.

I didn't want more blood on my hands.

I contemplated using my esp on them. But the problem

was that I could only invade one mind at a time. I knew I

could not work fast enough to incapacitate all of them

before one of those four boys panicked and put a few

rounds of hard steel into Melinda and me.

What had happened to the god?

What was this? Mere men overpowering me and out-

thinking me, me a god?

"This way, please," Morsfagen said.

We followed him.

VII

Morsfagen had directed the placement of armed sol-

diers in the storm drains under and within four blocks of

the Tombs. He had positioned a man behind every one of

the slit windows of the administration building where I

might possibly be able to force entrance. Even in the maze

of aluminum air-conditioning ducts which wound through

the great structure, a hundred men waited in silence with

their narcotics pistols drawn and their nerves honed to

crisp attention. With all of this waiting for me, I had

walked up the front steps and through the lobby as brazen

as a man could be. But even that had been planned for,

and a watch had been kept from one of the apparently

empty howlers parked before the Tombs entrance. They

had watched me go in, had identified me, had let me get

the girl, had let me bring her out, and then had nailed us.

Perhaps Morsfagen let it go on that long so that he could

level charges of jailbreak against both of us on top of

what the government already had drummed up. But I half

thought that he wanted to humiliate me as much as

anything. And he had.

They put us in a howler, took us through snowy streets

to the AC complex. They took Melinda away to a sepa-

rate preventive detention apartment and placed me in an-

other, where there were no sharp instruments or windows.

"General Morsfagen will see you tomorrow," the guard

told me as he left.

"Can't wait," I said.

The door closed, the lock snapped, and quiet de-

scended.

I flopped onto the bed and listened to the springs

whine, and I thought about what a stupid, fumbling idiot I

had been, even with Child's intellect integrated with my

own. I had gone back to the house to pack, even when I

should have realized that they would be coming for me.

That had ended in the deaths of an entire howler crew,

smashed and burning on my beach. Then I had gone to

the prison after Melinda, with my brilliant plan of bold-

ness, though I should have known that they would have

been expecting the unexpected. Perhaps part of the plan

was based on Child's cleverness—but another part was

based on my own impetuousness, and Morsfagen knew my

personality like the back of his hand—or better.

Look at yourself, Kelly, I yammered inside my head.

The only esper in the world, amplified by a partial ab-

sorption of the psychic energies of the most complete

genius—and still a failure. Still charging around with delu-

sions that invariably trip you up.

Before my meeting with Child and my therapy in the

mechanical psychiatrist, I had been going on the assump-

tion that I was some holy character, some bright and

shining product of godly grace, the Second Coming. Basi-

cally, I had been nothing more than a man, and I had only

suffered by my refusal to understand that. I blundered into

things acting like a god, and when I got hurt or fright-

ened, I couldn't cope. I had never prepared myself against

hurt and fear, for I could not see where either commodity

would impinge upon a god.

Now, with Child, I had unconsciously begun to accept

the god role again. Smug in the knowledge that I was

esper with a genius inside me, I slipped back into the habit

of looking on lesser mortals with contempt. And in my

self-assurance, I had failed to use all my talents and

intellect, had underestimated my enemy as the first Cro-

Magnons underestimated the Neanderthals for a while.

For a while ...

I stood up, suddenly less angry than I had been, and

more determined. Okay, so I was not a god. I was not

omniscient and omnipotent and superior to the military. I

could not excuse past stupidity, but I could improve

my outlook until I was able to be something which they

could not cope with. The reason Morsfagen and other

men could trip me up was simple to see: they were less

powerful men, but they were fully developed, capable, and

sure and confident. And I was fractured and unsteady and

filled with doubts beneath the sheen of smugness. It was

time to get to know myself, understand what I was and

what I could expect to accomplish. After countless circuits

of the main room of the apartment, I sat down on the bed

again and relaxed. And that night, I came to know myself

better than I ever had in my life.

I turned esp fingers back among the streaming thoughts

of my own conscious mind. It was something I had never

attempted before, though it now seemed the most natural

exercise in the world. Perhaps I had always felt that I

knew what I WPS thinking, that I was aware of myself.

But, of course, like every man, I hadn't the faintest damn

idea of what was going on inside my head. Head-tripping

in countless other minds, I had left the territory of my own

thoughts sacrosanct. Perhaps because I was afraid of what

I might find.

In those rambles, stirring down into my own id and ego

and superego, I found that I was purer, cleaner, less

rotted than I might even have hoped for. There were

things, of course, that terrified me and revolted me. But I

took heart in that they indicated my basic humanness, my

basic brotherhood with men, despite the fact I was made

from chemical sperm and chemical ovum.

In that one long night, I finally understood the nature

of society as I never had before. I had wrongly judged

men. I had labeled them as inferior to me, when this was

not the case. Some were inferior, some my equal, some

even my superior in ways. Each minim of intelligent life

on this planet was such an individual spark, such a varying

quantity and quality that no sweeping comparison could

ever be made. What I had always sensed and what I had

misinterpreted was that society was inferior to me. No

man. Society.

Society was an agglomeration of individuals equaling

less than its separate parts. In governments and institu-

tions, the men chosen to rule, chosen to make policy and

enforce decision, were those elected by the society that

supported them—and because each member of society is

different, because some median must be reached through

the ballot, mediocre men assume office. The very intelli-

gent vote for the intelligent candidates, but no one else

does, for everyone else distrusts intellect. The reactionary

and blind vote for their own slogan shouters, but no one

else does. In the end, the people in the middle range elect

their people, simply because they are in the majority. We

get the mediocre. And because the mediocre are ill-gifted

to deal with the problems of all factions of society, they

make bad government and bad institutions. They distrust

the intellectual and do not rely upon his wisdom. They

fear the reactionary and the blind because such people

threaten progress (a commodity the middle has been told

to embrace all its life). They repress the intellectuals and

the reactionaries and embrace their own people. But be-

cause they are mediocre, their own people are not served

well, and corruption flourishes. Where each individual of

society may be capable of governing his own sphere, the

agglomerate government is incapable of governing any-

thing except through intimidation and pure luck.

It may have been something that most people understand

early in life, but it was a revelation to me. To win the

games of existence, one must not attempt to fight by

society's rules, because in most cases, one is fighting indi-

viduals, and not society. To win, one must attack the

game on individual terms—not against a stereotype, not

against a societal image, but against the other man, the

single adversary.

The way to deal with Morsfagen was not as a tendril of

the military plant, but as a man. His weaknesses did not

lie in his adherence to the consensus—the consensus was

too huge ever to be weak at all—but with himself, in his

own human psyche.

Still, my problem was not solved. If I was not god, not

the superior creature I had thought I was, how could I act

at all? How could I function as an ordinary man? From

birth, I had come to think of myself as something special,

something sacred and superhuman. The attempt, now, to

operate as just another man, would run against the grain

of a lifetime of smug theory and self-delusion.

And then, quite suddenly, I knew what I had to do. It

came like the nick of a razor in the morning, making me

jerk with more surprise than it deserved. I should have

understood what had to be done some time ago. I had to,

finally, become the supreme being, the god, that I had

always thought I was!

I began pacing the room again. My feet swished on the

thick carpet. A clock ticked in the wall. Otherwise: heavy

silence.

Be God ...

God lay inside Child's mutant body, insane as He had

always been, trapped as Child and I had been for that

month. And though I did not want His madman's person-

ality, I could make a great deal of use of His psychic

energy. It was there to be tapped, the power that had

made worlds, had generated galaxies and universes, that

had established the infinitely fine balance of the cosmic

scale. I could delve back into Child's twisted body and find

the core of God's being, absorb Him and dissipate Him

throughout my own mind, as I had Child. God would be

part of me, a deeply threaded part without His own

identity. I would, indeed, for all purposes, be God.

I could not sleep for the rest of that night. I wanted to

see Morsfagen, wanted to try to work him as a human

being long enough to have him get me to Child. Then,

once he had done that, I would not have to deal with him

on a man-to-man basis. I would be above that.

I was frightened that night, seeing hulking creatures in

every shadow. In God's mind, down in that colossal id and

ego, what would things be like? Would I be able to handle

them, or would I be swamped and driven down, con-

sumed? I forced the latter possibility from my mind and

thought more positively. But the fear remained. It was not

unlike the fear a child feels the first time he enters a great

cathedral and sees the towering, somewhat menacing

figures of the saints carved in great pillars of marble.

Morsfagen came at nine o'clock, smiling. "I thought

you'd like to hear today's schedule," he said.

I said nothing, playing the role I had decided on.

"We start with a press release about the gun battle you

had with the police last night. Did you know that you

were seriously injured in that, perhaps fatally injured?"

He wanted some response that he could slap me down

for, but I didn't give him the satisfaction. I accepted.

"Later in the day, we'll release some film of that shoot-

out," he said. "We've already staged it. Looks very real

with lots of blood. We found a fairly good double for your

part, and we kept him mostly in the shadows so that it's

hard to tell, really, who he is."

I said nothing.

He shuffled the papers in his hand, went on. "According

to the reports, three officers will have died under your

guns. We've made up life histories for them, all very

touching. Two of them had large families and one had a

brother who was a priest We've put together composite

photographs of various real officers to release to the press.

Later tonight, word will be flashed to an outraged nation

that you have died on the operating table. Even though

you slaughtered the howler crew and three other police-

men, we were trying to save you, see? Now, the first

order of business today is for you to come along and help

us film the operating room sequences. A double won't

work in bright lights. I hope you can die convincingly, or

at least pretend to look dead while you're lying there.

Otherwise, you'll have to be drugged for it.

He stopped, watching me. It was time for my part, and

my lines were crystal clear to me. "Look, how about a

bargain," I said. I sounded fairly desperate.

He smiled. He was eating this up. Morsfagen's weakness

was not in his rigid acceptance of military codes and

consensus views, but in his need for power over other

human beings, his delight at being on top of another man.

I was giving him exactly what he wanted.

Maybe he would just hang himself with it.

"I fail to see," he said, "just what you have to bargain

with." He motioned around at the windowless walls.

"Something you don't know," I said. "Something that, if

you knew, would help you a great deal."

He frowned, smiled again. "And what would you want

for this valuable piece of information?"

"My freedom. Melinda's freedom. We'd stay in the city.

I'd do whatever you want."

"Oh, I hardly believe you would," he said.

"Look, Morsfagen, I'm not kidding you. I have some-

thing to tell you that could make a very big difference to

the Alliance. I am not lying, and you must believe that."

"I'd love to hear it," he said, dragging this out to relish

every moment of my groveling. "But you must choose

some other reward besides your freedom."

"Let the girl and me live here together. At least don't

keep us in separate apartments."

He smiled, seemed to consider it. "All right. She is some

nice piece, I'll tell you. That ought to be a big enough

reward. Now tell me what this secret is?"

I started to speak, then stopped abruptly, just as I had

planned, examining him with a great deal of suspicion. I

must have looked pathetic, hunched there on the edge of

the bed, unshaven, trying to bargain for petty favors that

would come without question to a free man. It was the

image I wanted him to have of me. "How do I know I can

trust you?" I asked. "How do I know you'll keep your

promise?"

He laughed sharply, deeply. "You don't."

"But that's not right!" I said. There was just the edge of

a whine in my voice. I was a broken man, yes I was. I was

just so many pieces for him to break further into dust.

"Fairness doesn't apply here," he said. "You'll just have

to trust me. Or forget it all."

I hesitated. "I have nothing to lose, I guess," I said. "So

I'll tell you." I hesitated again. Then I spoke: "I lied to

you when I saw it was dangerous for me to go back into

Child's mind. I just said that to get back into my own body

and to get out of the AC complex. I can go back into him

any time that I want, and I can bring a great deal of

valuable data out to you."

He burst into loud, almost uncontrolled laughter, his

face growing red. He slapped his sides with his hands,

almost dropping the sheaf of papers, and finally the laugh-

ter turned into a choking cough. When he looked up at

me again, he said, "I thought that much all along. I hadn't

yet decided to risk sending you back, 'cause you're too

valuable to lose. In a police state, an esper has more

duties hunting the enemy at home than abroad. Now I can

take the risk and clean out that freak's mind too. I thank

you for your kind assistance in this decision." He nodded

sarcastically.

"When will the girl be brought to me?" I asked, though

I knew the answer already.

"You trusted me," he said. "I appreciate that. It shows

that we will be getting along better than anticipated."

"I hope so."

"But there is one thing I think you should learn, for your

own good," he said. He waited until there was no alterna-

tive but for me to ask him what that lesson was.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Trust no one," he said. "The girl will remain in a

separate apartment."

I made a lunge for him, and the guard beside him

slapped me across the face with the butt of a rifle. It was

a deal more than I had bargained for. My jaws snapped

together, banging my teeth painfully into my gums. I saw

stars, multicolored one with a thousand points each, and

crashed back onto the bed.

I tasted blood, spat it on the sheets. It was curiously

bright there, glistening.

"Have you learned the lesson?" he asked.

"You lied," I said.

"I guess you've learned the lesson, then."

"That all military men are emasculated power freaks

who can't make it with a woman but dig beating up on

other men with guns."

"Keep it up," he warned.

"Sexless bastard!" I hissed.

"Larry," he called to the young soldier. The boy

stepped forward, holding his rifle ready. Morsfagen mo-

tioned to me, quite the cavalier, and conveyed the necessi-

ty of what must be done.

Larry took two more paces, stepped in front of me,

drew the rifle over his head—all of this happening so

slowly, so measuredly that it seemed like a ballet—and

brought the square butt down on my left shoulder so hard

that I felt tissue separating.

I did not see the pretty stars at all this time, only a

velvety and total darkness....

When I woke up, it was to the acrid odor of smelling

salts which I rebelled against, gagging and pushing back

from the stuff. But aside from that quite natural rejection,

I offered no opposition. For the moment, Morsfagen was

convinced he knew me. He suspected nothing and thought

my anger was genuine.

I followed docilely to the corridor, the elevator, and the

filming studios, where I played dead for them. Quite

convincingly, he told me. They even let me bleed a little

for them....

By late afternoon, the films had been made. There was

a team waiting to rush the product to the city's main

broadcasting facilities, where it would be shown for the

edification and entertainment of the consensus citizenry

sitting safe at home this night.

From there, we went to Child's room, where nothing

had changed: lights dim, bedclothes rumpled, the mutant

husk still lying there in the smell of sickness, antiseptics,

and starch.

"Are you ready?" Morsfagen asked.

I'm not only ready, but anxious! I thought. But I did

not say anything. It seemed the time to be petulant,

snippy, moody. And he seemed to relish my performance.

The lights were dimmed, the recorders started, Child

raised a little in his bed, and I was at last within reach of

the godhood I had been seeking all my life....

FOUR

Man As God...

I

I touched the sheen of His mental surface, drew back

from the cold, humming tune of ultimate power.

In the darkness of the empty conscious mind, I hovered

over the bending amber shell, slid along its eternal curve

toward the horizon which always danced just beyond my

grasp. In time, I found the weak spot on that amber

smoothness, saw the moving shadows of things beneath, of

things in the id and ego below. I pried at that weak spot,

slit it open, sailed through and into God's mind....

Imagine:

Imagine the largest mirror in the universe, a million

light-years from edge to beveled edge (no matter who the

artisans were who created such a marvel, it is only the

mirror itself which engages us). On such a great glass,

there would be literally countless millions of visions, bits

and pieces of colorful landscapes and peoples, events and

futures and pasts and even moments of sundry present-

tunes. Further imagine a cosmic hammer as large as a star

(again, we care not of the men who forged that instru-

ment, but only of its actions) brought to bear on the very

center of that fantastic mirror. And then imagine the

flying shards of silvered glass clattering down, down, down

into the bottom of Existence, to the end of Time, and

there to lie in pools of pitch blackness with their wild re-

flections frozen in them.

This was the mental landscape inside of Child this time,

far different from what it had been. It was a mind of

superhuman dimensions, fractured into near uselessness,

the mind of God, the Being who had made the Earth, the

galaxy, the universe, and each of us in it, the god who had

forged the first DNA and RNA and begun the craziest

dream ever. And yet it was the most disorganized place I

had ever seen—disorganized and brilliant at the same

moment, wilder, stranger, more fearful than any mind I

had seen in all my years of head-tripping.

I settled through glazes of amber ...

... through ice spicule clouds the color of freshly spilled

blood...

. . . through a fine blue fog and finally down into the

smashed visions of this mad universe...

For a while I hung there, feet of my analogue body

inches above a glittering shard of stars. Then I touched

bare toes on galaxies and walked across the ruined skies to

another fragment, this a jungle scene with strange birds

and stranger ambulatory plants. I seemed to settle down

into the jungle, to become a part of it, though the moment

I wished to go on I ceased this empathy and rose until I

stood above it, looking down on it—and looking out on

the millions of other scenes awaiting me on the flat black

table of nothingness.

I set out, searching for the core of God, for the shat-

tered glass that held Him.

He could not be far.

Wasn't God everywhere?

I walked through a place of flowers where the earth was

as thick as water reeds with boles as large around as two

men could link their arms. The leaves were high overhead

and did not allow even a minim of sunshine through.

I walked through a place of flowers where the earth was

carpeted with an explosion of ripe colors, where clouds of

spores rose and swept by me as their season came, where

seeds stuck to my analogue body from the sappy tendrils

of man-sized milkweed plants.

I saw a red sky with a blue sun, and the land was

parched and empty beneath both.

Twice as I wandered, I felt His onrushing presence, the

huge power of His disabled mind. I reached out, grasping

blindly for Him, but He was gone in the instant, leaving

me groping and frustrated.

Several times, the sky itself came screaming down,

compressing the air beneath it until my analogue body

threatened to explode. The sky shattered around me, was

resurrected as flocks of blue-white birds, and rose again

to hang high over everything.

The earth rose and fell like a beating breast, the vibra-

tions of the heart muscle coursing through me.

There were creatures with many eyes, others with more

legs than I could count.

Dead birds fell from the sky by the tens of thousands,

became lizards when they struck the earth, climbed the

rocks about me, grew wings, and entered the clouds again.

There were places where the trees wailed and broke

open with ugly sores, bled as if they were made of flesh.

The dripping blood became crimson pebbles where the

tree touched the earth.

I stalked through this chaos, searching.

At last, I came upon Him where He was desperately

trying to coalesce into an analogue form with which He

could contact me. He was a smoky, bluish pillar of psychic

energy, roiling, tumbling, spitting sparks of many colors,

at last jelling into the shape of a man: Buddha.

"It is a wise man who knows how to compromise,"

Buddha said, rubbing His large bare belly and smiling

down at me. He towered twenty feet into the air.

"I will not compromise," I said.

"The seven lives——"

I pushed on. "I will not compromise." I extended fingers

of my own psychic energy, and felt out the core of God,

seeking for the pattern to its structure.

The figure shifted, became an image of Jesus Christ.

"Truly, I say unto you, a man who recognizes his own

mortality is a happier man. A man who comes to live with

his weakness with all humility is a man destined for my

kingdom."

I grasped Jesus' neck with psychic hands and throttled

Him.

He exploded, whirled into a column of energy, a furi-

ous, storming energy that longed to strike out at me but

could not. Power is useless without a mechanism to har-

ness and control it, and His mechanism had long ago

deteriorated beyond the point of effectiveness. God was a

hugely powerful pool of psychic energy without a manipu-

latory system: a car without wheels.

I reached with my own mental tendrils, and oblivious to

the halfhearted and misdirected weapons He brought to

bear against me, also oblivious of His pitiful pleading, I

threaded him. He wanted to maintain His power, even

though He was insane, and I could not make Him under-

stand that it was time for a new God.

He wriggled and twisted in a vain attempt to pull free

of me.

As I encircled Him, I knew that God had been insane

long before Child had ever approached Him, had been a

raving and incoherent mass of energy for—perhaps—

millennia. All mankind's faiths had failed to understand

the basic reason for chaos, for blind violence and hatred.

We had attributed all the bad things of this world to

"divine tests" of man's will and courage. But all of that

was a theological falsehood, for the force energizing the

universe was madness, not reason; insanity and not mer-

cy. The madness had reached even the smallest particle of

His being, aged like wine into the purest elements of

horror.

Here died Jesus.

And Mohammed.

Here died Buddha and Yahweh.

But it was not all a loss.

For here, at last, I was born in my new image, to

replace half a thousand false gods.

Burn the old altars and prepare new ones. Council your

children with different commandments and slaughter the

freshest of your lambs so that I may taste their blood in

the morning dew.

I bled His energy away just as I might have tapped a

dynamo or a battery, distributed it through my own psy-

chic power until He was no longer a separate entity but

merely another area of my own mind, as Child now was,

another rising bank of power cells to draw upon for the

creation of miracles. Not a shred of His personality or

self-awareness remained; for all purposes, He had died—

or had been transubstantiated, which was all the same

now. His memories had been evaporated, and only the

magnificent white brilliance of His power remained, con-

densed, purified, and made ready for use. For my use. It

was now, after all, my power.

I had killed God, quite simply, just as I had killed Child

some days before.

I felt no remorse.

Does one feel remorse when one shoots down a maniac

who is wielding a gun in a crowded department store?

Man as God. I retained the mortal form and the mortal

outlook, with the emotions and the prejudices of men. I did

not think that would be a weakness, but that it might

actually make me a more benevolent and stable deity

than the previous owner of my power had been. Man as

God...

I vaporized the glittering metal analogues held in the

fragments of mirror to my right. They disappeared with-

out sound or light. I spread my hands, as in addressing the

multitudes, and eliminated all the other pieces of that

"cosmic mirror.

There was total darkness drawing down about me like

an oiled curtain.

I made light.

With the light, I fashioned stairs leading upward into

further regions of darkness.

I walked out of there, erasing the stairs behind me.

Outside, the world awaited me, unknowing but soon to

learn....

II

When I returned to my own body, carrying the power

with me, the first thing I saw was Child's mutant shell

convulsed with a series of hideous spasms that made it

look much like the flickering, shape-changing image in a

funhouse mirror. It sat straight up in bed, quivering like

the shaft of an arrow. Its eyes were wide for the first

time, the pulsing veins visible in the whites. Its slitted

mouth worked furiously, though no words issued from it,

no sounds at all. It scrabbled at its chest with two bony

hands, clawed at its horrible face so viciously and persis-

tently that blood seeped from the long red welts it carved

in the flesh there.

The doctor attending the mutant grabbed it and at-

tempted to force it backward onto the mattress, where

restraining straps could be applied. But it heaved the

white-smocked figure aside as if the man were so much

paper, in an exhibition of strength that no one could have

expected from such an emaciated body, from such skinny

arms and powerless hands.

A dry rasping-hacking sound emanated from the crea-

ture's throat, but no words formed. It could have been

tissue ripping under some unimaginable inward pressure

rather than a conscious exercise of vocal cords.

"What's going on here?" Morsfagen demanded, rising

from his chair with that slow, powerful, and somehow

contemptible grace of his, cutting air like a sail.

The soldier named Larry came across the room, looking

confused but determined. He dropped his rifle, and

reached for the mutant. The creature snapped at him,

sunk teeth into his wrist, and made blood fountain up

brightly. The soldier screamed, struck at the mutant's

face, smashed the jawbone. The mouth relaxed, released

him, but the mutant was still awake, still struggled to gain

control of itself and of the situation it found itself in.

"You did this!" Morsfagen roared, turning on me, point-

ing with a hand that trembled uncontrollably.

"No," I said quietly.

"You'll pay! Damn you, you'll see the woman raped for

this, you'll see her humiliated!"

I could not even summon up the slightest bit of disgust

for him. I looked with the eyes of the man I had been, but

with the judgment of a god, and I could do no more than

pity him. In a way, I resented my benevolence. I had

longed for the power to strike back with thunder and with

lightning. But now that the time had come, I found him

deserving of scorn and pity more than wrathful venge-

ance.

"What is wrong with him?" he asked, shoving his broad

face square into mine.

I knew exactly what was happening with Child's husk,

though the rest of them could never possibly strike upon

the truth. When I had left that shell, I had momentarily

forgotten something which I should have remembered.

There was still one portion of Child's mind down there in

the black waste of his body: the id. All those scorpion

analogues which I had dispersed in the ice-floored subter-

ranean cavern so long ago were now risen up and in

command of the mutant flesh. Normally the most directly

impotent of the mind's factions, it now reigned without

control, without opposition. But the id alone was not a

functioning consciousness and could never hope to control

the body: the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome was a

complete impossibility, something that could only exist in

fiction. The mutant husk would die now, days after its

mental expiration, with the scorpion-clawed id seeking con-

trol to gratify its sex lusts and its blood longings.

"Everyone grab him at once!" Morsfagen directed,

leading the others in on the bed.

The mutant thrashed wildly, pitched from side to side of

the bed. Finally, it grasped the rails and clambered against

them, flung itself over the side. It crashed onto the floor

with a sickening crunch of flimsy bones, biting at the air,

spitting blood across the tiles, clawing and weakly kicking

at anyone who tried to bend to it, or to give it assistance

in its time of need. To the id, there was no such thing as a

friend, and it acted accordingly.

Then it succumbed.

Quietly, like a sigh.

Motionless on the hospital floor, with smears of blood

marking the space around it, it seemed more like a squashed

insect than the ex-home of a human creature.

They stared at the corpse for a long while, transfixed,

perhaps, by its inhumanness. Then Morsfagen turned to

look at me with the malevolence I had once despised.

"You killed him," he said matter-of-factly, beyond ha-

tred now. He turned to the soldier named Larry. "Arrest

him. Get that bastard out of my sight!"

Larry lifted his gun, grinning. He enjoyed using it too

much. As he advanced on me like a homicidal maniac, I

began to think that even the mindless shell of the mutant

had been more human that this boy. Behind those eyes,

there was something a little less than a man.

"Stop where you are," I said.

But he did not, of course.

I reached out for him, touched him, took him. His face

went utterly blank, and he ceased his advance.

"What the hell—" Morsfagen began.

With other esp fingers, I touched the minds of everyone

in that room and delivered them into a state of sleep

which was not quite sleep, closer to death but not quite

death. There, they would be far out of my way so that I

might concentrate on the work ahead. Cautiously, I en-

tered their minds with an ability I had never had before:

neither in scope nor in power. I spread out their lives,

their neuroses and psychoses, and I carefully untangled the

knots that had warped each man and woman's psyche

over the years. When they woke, they would be emotion-

ally and mentally stable for the first time. The old fears

and worries would no longer plague them, and their per-

sonalities (which had been structured all their lives to

nurture the needs which were produced by those fears and

worries) would be drastically reshaped. But for the better,

surely—for the better. I was God, and I could not make

mistakes.

Otherwise, why would you worship me?

I departed from the minds in the room, though I did

not summon anyone back to consciousness. I did not need

their help to command the tides and to grow storms in the

heavens—nor for the much broader changes I wished to

bring about in the world.

I settled down to bringing a new face to the Earth,

enjoying every moment of my godhood—perhaps too

well....

III

And there, in that hospital room in the upper floors of

the Artificial Creation complex, with the dead and bleed-

ing mutant form before me, I knew the greatest triumphs

of my entire life. I ranged far from those white walls,

though I never once rose from the chair in which I sat. I

flew over seas and continents without benefit of a body—

without even an analogue form—to contain my psychic

energies. Miracles were within my grasp now, and though

I did not change any water into wine or raise any men

from the dead, I did other things, yes, other things....

The first order of business, so far as I was concerned,

was to reach downward through the floors of the great

structure and locate that place where I had been born,

where plastic womb had contained me and where wired

uterus had spit me out. It was no sentimental journey, no

longing for a return to those cold mother walls, but the

bitter-sweet taste of a deeply abiding vengeance.

I sent my awareness drifting down through the layers of

the huge building, through plaster and lath, plastic and

steel, through electrical conduits and wads of fluffy in-

sulating material. I passed the radiating awareness of

other human beings, but did not stop to handle them just

yet, bent on the confrontation I had dreamed of for years.

Oedipal?

Not exactly. I did not want to kill my father and marry

my mother, merely to kill my mother and be free. Cer-

tainly, there was a quality of love in it too, but that was

easily overlooked.

I found the lowest two floors, where the paraphernalia

of the genetic engineers cored the walls like fungus, fila-

ments threaded through the plaster like disease worms.

Machines descended from the ceilings of the rooms, thrust

upward from the floors. There were blocks of data process-

ing computers, memory banks and calculating components

which handled everything from temperature regulation

to DNA-RNA balance in the chemical sperm and egg.

Along the walls and on various raised platforms around the

floor there were programming keyboards for the men and

women who maintained the delicacy of the computers'

decisions.

In every great chamber, the center of attention was the

womb itself. It was contained in a large, square glass tank

whose exterior walls were more than three inches thick.

Between these outer petitions and the meat of the nut,

there were thinner layers of grass along with fiberglass

wads of insulation. In the center were the nonconductive

plastic walls, cored with the miles of wires reporting

conditions back to the computers. There were electrode

nubbins there by the tens of thousands, and waldoes so

minuscule as to be unbelievable were doing impossibly

tiny things to impossibly tiny creations, spheres of cells

not yet remotely shaped like human beings.

Mother...

The womb, darkness, quietude, thrumming pulse of

hidden works felt more than heard ...

There were more than eighty technicians and medical

attendants clustered in the rooms of the genetic engineer-

ing equipment, all of them busy. I reached out with my

godly esp and took control of every one of their minds.

Work ceased; conversation broke off in midsentence. I

directed them out of that place, upward through the

building to regions of safety.

I surveyed the place as a sense of power stirred in me

the like of which I had never experienced before. It was

not the magnitude of the feeling, but the quality which

made it so different. For the first time, I understood my

godhood in a personal sense, understood that revenge was

possible on a scale that I had never before comprehended.

I had not been able to release that pent-up vengeance on a

man, like Morsfagen, because pity had outweighed anger.

But I could never pity a machine, a thing without feelings.

I realized that my vengeance would always have to be

directed against ideas and things and constructions borne

of those ideas rather than against men; all men were piti-

able in their stupid blindness to fact, but the creations of

that stupidity, the ideas and ideals based on that stupidity

deserved nothing but loathing and condemnation.

For a moment, I had the fleeting thought that this sense

of power over the artificial wombs was much like the sense

of power which the young guard at the Tombs had experi-

enced in his fantasies about slaughtering his parents in

their bed. Like him, I was rising up against the most

fundamental loyalty of my life, against the salty seed and

the warm womb which had engendered me (albeit, with

the aid of some eighty technicians and physicians and

computer programmers). But I thrust that notion down

and got on with the job at hand.

I raised my figurative ax over my mother's symbolic

head and savored the destruction I was about to

wreak....

Did Jesus think of striking Mary down? Hardly. But I

had given up that vision of God. I was another sort

altogether.

I split open the surfaces of the walls and peeled back

the plastic and the plaster, revealed the snaking conduits

and the tangled ganglion of wires. I grasped these nerves

gleefully and tore them free of the womb structures, sent

the complex mechanisms into shuddering, heavy spasms of

mechanical terror and confusion, into wrenching machine

agony that drew smoke rather than blood or tears.

Moving swiftly, almost maniacally, I wrenched the pro-

gramming keyboards loose of their connections and

smashed them repeatedly into the floor.

The wombs were no longer connected to a brain to tell

them what to do with themselves.

Smoke rose from the blocks of data-processing equip-

ment, and tapes whined senselessly through the memory

banks, seeking answers that could not be found.

There was but one answer, and that answer was God,

and that God was me....

I shattered the glass outer walls of all the wombs,

The floor was littered with fragments of sharp, bright,

and bloodless flesh.

I broke inward, reached the heart of each warm, dark

chamber, and shredded the slowly forming germ cells,

squashed them.

I destroyed the wombs from inside, working back

toward the shattered outer walls until there was nothing

left but powder and fumes.

It must have looked singularly strange in that place:

invisible hands making havoc in the center of that techno-

logical wonder; explosions without origin; plastic dribbling

down and lying in cooling puddles on the floor; smoke

rising everywhere.... It must have looked as if Nature

had risen up in fury to dispose of such a blasphemous and

pretentious project as this last folly of man's.

In essence, that was exactly what had happened.

Mother was dead.

And she was disfigured.

I had never had a father.

I left that place of smoldering memories, of twisted

plastic and running wires, jellied tubes and transistors,

returned to the hospital room where my body sat in the

same chair where I had left it. Morsfagen and the others

remained in a state of suspended animation, offering no

resistance.

In a few moments, I had made all the necessary deci-

sions; I knew what had to be done next. I had decided

everything with the speed and the thoroughness of a

super-computer, my thought processes racing faster and

faster as the godly power within me became further inte-

grated with my own mind. And I knew there were no

flaws in my plans.

A god is not plagued with doubt.

I divorced my mind from my body again, and sought

out of the AC complex, across vast stretches of land

toward the minds of other men, where I would begin to

build the new world. I found the members of the junta,

one by one, and altered their minds. I rooted deeply,

found their personality problems and removed them. I

gave them the best psychotherapy man had ever imagined,

and left them without a desire to rule.

Then; in each man's mind, I planted the desire for a

return to elective government, and left them as their own

counter-revolutionaries.

Next, I began a methodical search of the corners of the

world; I radiated a growing, toughening web of power

that sought out the minds of every leader in every nation,

down through the lowest bureaucratic posts. I cleared

those minds of power-hunger, of sexual frustration turned

into violence. I healed them like a prophet with the power

of god in his hands, and I left them better men.

Not satisfied yet, I struck downward and located - all

the men with the potential of leadership, even though they

were not yet in positions to guide the destinies of their

fellow citizens. I cleaned house in every psyche, helped all

of them to learn to cope with existence and with their

own place in the scheme of things.

And still my power grew. Or, perhaps, the more I used

it, the better my manipulatory mechanisms became.

Next, I found the stockpiles of nuclear weapons hidden

in all corners of the globe. I turned the fissionable materi-

al into lead by making Time flow a million times faster

around the vicinity of the weapons. In the biochemical

warfare laboratories, I destroyed all the mutant strains of

death that scientists had generated. I opened the minds of

those same scientists and cleansed them, made them reject

the need to create death in order to feel worthy and

powerful.

And the day wore on.

And evening came.

Still, I toiled.

It was somewhere beyond midnight when I finished

reshaping the world and returned to my body in the AC

complex. With all that I had done, I still felt energetic.

None of my vitality had been sapped; it even seemed to

have been magnified. The power I wielded was now more

complex and enormous than I could ever have imagined.

I stretched my esp out and lingered along the surface of

the moon, looking firsthand at the craters with eyes I

constructed from the cold vacuum of space.

Stars winked close at hand, warm and yet freezing,

pricks of light, yet mammoth stars.

I sped outward to them.

I touched red giants and white dwarfs, plummeted

through the center of a sun, listening to the songs of

exploding hydrogen, to the creation of matter, and to its

instant destruction—or, rather, to its instant conversion

into light and heat.

Energy...

I seemed to gain energy from every source I approached.

My own light was brighter than that from any star, and

was controlled far more intricately, making it more deadly

and more important than countless suns in mindless erup-

tion.

I passed outward beyond the galaxy.

I reached the end of the universe, sped through impene-

trable walls of pearl gray, kept on going through dimen-

sions until I reached another plane of creation.

And then I came back, skipping from galaxy to galaxy—

then from star to star—then from planet to planet, finally

back into the room where my mortal shell sat stupidly.

I rose up from the chair and left that room after

turning Morsfagen and the others loose. I walked down

the corridor and found Melinda's rooms, opened the door

without touching it, and walked inside. I could have come

to her with my mind, but I wanted the personal touch of

flesh on flesh for this last and ultimate step of the plan.

"You're free," I said as she turned from her window

and looked at me, grinning her beautiful grin.

She started toward me....

And then I was to learn just how lonesome and awful

the role of a god can be. I was about to meet with my

first near-disaster since I had claimed the power....

IV

We were strangers.

We had made love and been in love, had shared secrets

and dreams. I had risked my life for her, and she had

done the same for me, though in a different manner.

And yet, I did not know her. She seemed like a crippled

doll, speaking with the voice of some hidden puppet-master

who was a terrible craftsman and who was even worse

at writing dialogue for his wooden creatures to perform

on stage.

Everything she said seemed witless and stupid and—

perhaps most unforgivably of all—utterly boring. I could

not understand how such, a woman could ever have inter-

ested me, even for the brief moments of lovemaking.

Surely I had never been so anxious for the feel and taste

of flesh that I had wooed and taken this creature in my

arms! That seemed, now, like nothing more than animal-

loving—bestiality.

In my arms, she was a pet

And nothing more.

Yet I knew what she had once been, and I understood

that she could again be important to me. I was certain, all

at once, that all that was required was a change of her

personality, a growing up. I put her into the same sus-

pended animation I had used with others, delved into her

mind with my omnipotence and straightened out the

quirks there, brought her swiftly to her full human poten-

tial.

I woke her.

And I sorrowed.

Her full human potential was not enough.

She was strikingly beautiful, filled with a sensuality that

made my loins stir, that would make any man sit up and

take full notice of her. She was the essence of femininity,

full-breasted, round-hipped, and long-legged, with honey

hair and wide eyes, Ml lips and quick pink tongue. But

she was no more than that to me. Even a beautiful

woman who outshines all other females is of no interest if

her mind seems as sawdust and her words strike you as

the rambling proclamations of an idiot.

And so she seemed to me: an idiot, a thing, a moving

construct of flesh. But not a woman I loved.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said. It pained me even to be forced to

speak. Couldn't she understand me, without verbaliza-

tions? Couldn't she eke out even a hint of my thoughts

without my having to spell them out for her in clean, crisp

words and phrases?

"Something is," she said.

"Nothing."

"You're so distant. I can't tell if you're really there or

not."

Oh, God, oh, God, I moaned to myself. But there was

no use in that. It didn't help to pray to myself.

"It's as if," she said, "it's not you inside there. Maybe

Child has taken over. Maybe just a little part of nun has."

"No," I said.

"But if Child had taken you over, he would make you

say that to satisfy me, wouldn't he?"

I said nothing.

"So maybe that's it."

"No."

I was very weary, very old.

"Something, anyway," she said.

"Yes. Something."

"I haven't asked you how you got here? How did you

shake the cops?" She was smiling through all of this, though

her face belied her true feelings beyond those brightly

flashing teeth.

I did not answer her. I merely looked at her with a

deep and melancholy sense of loss. And with a fear of the

future that was to be mine from this day forth.

I saw, now, why God had eventually lost all touch with

reality, had stepped across the thin red line into utter

madness. He had begun as a super-intelligent creature able

to set the precarious movements of the universe in perfect

harmony, able to structure the balance of all creation. But

as time had passed, He grew introverted because of His

lack of company. There was no one worthy of Him, equal

to Him, and He had stagnated with this lack of personal

conflict and motivations.

The same would happen to me in time. It might require

millennia, but it would happen all the same. Some day, I

would whirl across the universe from one dark point to

the other, insane, and babbling, my manipulatory mechan-

isms unable to harness the great psychic energy inside of

me.

"I think I'm afraid of you," she said.

"I'm afraid of me too," I said.

"What's happened?" she asked.

But there was no sense telling her. There was no way to

convey the absolute emptiness of the eternity that stretched

before me. I had wanted a woman all my life, wanted

to be loved and to return that affection tenfold. And now

that I had finally shaken off all the false notions which had

kept me from having a love—the false notions had come

true and I was right back where I had started from.

And there seemed no hope at all. It seemed I had lost

her.

V

But I had not lost her.

Even as I resigned myself to the future that all gods

must face, I realized how the problem could be resolved. I

had not been thinking with the omniscience of a god, and

now that I suddenly began to apply myself as fully as I

could, an answer loomed immediately in sight. I should

have realized that to God there are no insoluble problems.

Why, then, had the previous God gone mad? Why

hadn't He done what I was about to do to solve His

loneliness? I thought I knew the answer to that one. He

had not considered this utter loneliness to be a debit;

perhaps He had not realized, as His existence had grown

more petty and introverted, that what He needed was

someone with whom to converse, exchange viewpoints and

outlooks and mental visions. And by the time He had

understood, it was too late: He was crazy.

What I had in mind was singularly simple. I took her by

the shoulders and drew her next to me, reached into her

mind with all the force of my esp.

She tried to fight.

It was no good.

I held her, and I funneled into her half the booming

godly energy which I had contained, until the two of us

were gods, each one half a god compared to the one deity

before.

Her mind burst with psychedelic visions.

I fought down the rejection her own personality threw

up, and helped her integrate the white power of godhood

into her own being. We stood there for a very long while,

locked physically and mentally as the changes came to her

as they had come to me.

And we parted.

She took my hand, tenderly.

We did not speak.

There was no need for speech.

Together, we left that room and that building and went

forth to take command of the world. The altar candles

would be lighted, the prayers of the multitudes begun, and

the sacrificial lambs led to the butchering block.

We passed many years on a perfect earth, racing from it

to the corners of the universe. We saw all the places that

had existed in the shattered mirror of God's mental ana-

logue that time so long ago when I had confronted Him

inside Child's mutant husk.

There were worlds where trees grew ugly sores and bled

on the ground.

There were worlds where the sky shattered around us,

was resurrected a hundred times every hour.

We saw walking plants that had built civilization

within the darkness of an alien jungle.

We saw stones that spoke and stars that felt real pain.

For ten thousand years, we roamed the corners of

existence, learning what sort of kingdom we had inherited.

And one day, Melinda said, "I'm bored. I've seen it

all."

"I agree," I agreed.

"Let's revive religion," she said. "Let's at least let the

people know we exist. We can come to them in burning

bushes and in talking doves, and at least that will be

amusing."

"Sounds fine," I said.

And though we had ended the rivalries of religions, we

went down to the earth and revived them. We brought

forth temples and synagogues, churches and altars, and

garish robes and bejeweled priests. We created hierarchies

of worthless prelates, and we spoke our words to the

masses through the mouths of men of less value than most

other men.

And for a time, that was fine, rather like camp culture.

But soon the novelty of it wore off—like camp culture too.

"I'm bored," she said.

"Me too."

"But what is left?" she asked.

"We could stir things up a bit," I said.

"Stir things?"

"A war or two. Some killings. We could take sides. You

could command the Southern Hemisphere, and I the

North. And the winner—yes, I've got it! The winner will

be permitted to expend enough energy to create a new

race of beings on some far-flung world!"

"Marvelous!" she said, clasping her perfect hands across

the full, rounded breasts I had come to know so well.

We had long ago learned that the energy required to

create a race of beings or to form a new planet was too

much of a drain on us. We required five centuries of

recuperation from such a task, and recuperation meant

boredom—which we could not afford.

It was a grand prize, then.

And the wars began. They still rage, for she is a

formidable opponent, though I do believe I will eventually

whip her Hemisphere with a contingent of laser-weaponed

soldiers I have been concealing in a state of suspended

animation beneath the North Pole. They are members of

the Canadian army, well-trained and deadly. She does not

know of them.

We have a fine time.

We play our games, battling for the grand prize, both

of us already imagining what interesting and grotesque

race we could create if permitted the use of the power.

We have a fine time.

On earth, men die, thrown at each other by our machi-

nations. Some fleeting moments, when I am waiting for

her to make her move, I consider my origins: made of

men. I consider my life and Harry Kelly and Morsfagen

and the lot of them. And then I consider what I am

doing, and the old darkness in my soul returns. But not

for long, of course. I am no fool. Morsfagen is dead. The

society we knew has fallen to newer ones. Harry is long

ago gone. I barely remember what he looked like. So we

play our games and forget our doubts. Gods can have no

doubts, as I said once before.

We play our games.

We have a fine time.