A Darkness in My Soul

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 presenttunes. Further imagine a cosmic hammer as large as a star (again, we care not of the men who forged that instrument, 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 reflections 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 shattered 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 vibrations 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 furious, storming energy that longed to strike out at me but could not. Power is useless without a mechanism to harness 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 manipulatory 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 understand 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-perhapsmillennia. 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 mercy. 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 psychic 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 diedor had been transubstantiated, which was all the same now. His memories had been evaporated, and only the magnificent white brilliance of His power remained, condensed, 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 without 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 persistently that blood seeped from the long red welts it carved in the flesh there.

The doctor attending the mutant grabbed it and attempted 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 creature'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, pointing 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 vengeance.

"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 subterranean 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 control 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 hatred 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 entered 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 emotionally and mentally stable for the first time. The old fears and worries would no longer plague them, and their personalities (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 bleeding 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 bodywithout 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 insulating 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. Certainly, 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, filaments 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 processing 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 engineering 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 pitiable 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 experienced 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 programming 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 equipment, 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 technological 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 decisions; 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 integrated 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 material 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 eruption.

I passed outward beyond the galaxy.

I reached the end of the universe, sped through impenetrable walls of pearl gray, kept on going through dimensions until I reached another plane of creation.

And then I came back, skipping from galaxy to galaxythen 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 andperhaps most unforgivably of all-utterly boring. I could not understand how such, a woman could ever have interested 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 animalloving-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 suspended 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 potential.

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 verbalizations? 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 mechanisms 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 analogue 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 machinations. 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.