A Darkness in My Soul

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 intended 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 bewildered, 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 employees 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 imprisonment 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 intersection, 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 disappeared. 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 voluntary 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 standing 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 unerringly 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 hundred 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 hundred 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 whitesmocked 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 physician 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 shouting 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 without 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 thousand 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 whatsoever. 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 seventeenmile-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 backache. 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 comparison. That was why the young peace criers were so militant. 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 metamorphosed 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 thousand 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 Aurelius. 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 cerebral, 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 photograph 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 stealer of souls.

I could see the hollow compartment which would swallow 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 generations never had the advantage of a Porter-Rainey SolidState 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 descended, 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 examination (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 thermostatic 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 filament 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 imitated 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 changing 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 exploded 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 ILLUSION 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 likeSOMETHING 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 decapitate you with words and shame.

Breasts. Big breasts that I- That II 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 REALITY. 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, OFNo. 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 BECAUSE 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 EVENTUALLY 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 bedroom and collapsed onto the mattress without pulling the covers over me.

I tried to encourage pleasant dreams of Marcus Aurelius.

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 disturbances 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 planet 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 mastered 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 icicles 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 Herodtrying 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 everywhere. 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 amHe 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 subcurrent, 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 SubOughT-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 something-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 Scheherazade came on, and the walls took on color again, spattered 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, mysterious. 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'ssakeshe'snaked… naked… nakednakednakednaked!

STOP DREAMING! WAKE! LISTEN TO ME; HOLD

YOURSELF TOGETHER AND LISTEN TO ME.

IQUIET. COMPOSE YOURSELF. I WILL INTERPRET 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 PRECISELY, AS THE INCARNATION OF CHRIST AS REPRESENTED 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 SPILLING 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-ENCOMPASSING AS THOSE OF THE CHRIST MYTH,

BUT THEY ARE SUFFICIENTLY STRONG TO NURTURE 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 DOUBLE 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 UPBRINGING); 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.

I 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 NEATLY BUILT THEORY. HE IS ANOTHER VIRGIN

BIRTH, OF THE ORIGIN THAT YOU ARE OF. YOU

REALIZE THAT HE HAD BUILT THE SAME SECOND-COMING THEORY TO EXPLAIN HIS OWN

PURPOSE IN THE WORLD. YOU UNDERSTAND

THAT SINCE HE HAS MET YOU, HIS LIFE PURPOSE 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 ESTABLISH A SERIES OF PERSONALITY TAPES TO

REINFORCE YOUR FALTERING SENSE OF REALITY 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 invasion, 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 vagabonds 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 deception 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 progression, partially because it might lead to something of interest 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, sputtering, 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 laughing.

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 bloodthirsty 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 discovery 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. Perhaps 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 awaiting 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 militants 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 people 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 beforesomething 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 perspiration 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 Japanese. 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 downnot 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 Minotaur.

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 distant 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 grumble, 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 answered; 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.