Nightcrawlers

42

Godfrey was still conscious, not completely, but wavering in the gray netherworld between dream and reality. He was part of the mother organism, rooted into her now, yet his mind seemed to drift through her, knowing things and understanding things and somehow maintaining a sort of individuality. Being part of her was revelation. Her chemistry was utterly alien to what his was used to, so he scaled peaks of euphoria and dropped down into dark abysses. She made adjustments, weaning him slowly and making him part of something much larger than himself, filling him with herself and letting him experience the hallucinatory delight of herself.

The beauty of it was there was no hate or anger.

These were purely simian reactions to frustrations and disappointments and things that could not be controlled or anticipated. Negative emotions did not exist within the mother organism. They were impractical and incomprehensible things to her. So even though joining with her had been painful—that was Godfrey’s own fault because he resisted—it was now bliss.

He became a nova inside her, a raging cloud of supercharged dust that blew through the world, igniting things and being ignited, burning white-hot and traveling impossible distances through space and time. He breathed out searing mushroom clouds and screamed colors. The world was his and he devoured it bite by bite, laying waste to the works of man and destroying the scurrying masses with searing heat.

Then the world was empty.

There was nothing.

He seeded it with himself and watched the cooling clay remains of the human race blossoming into a new and better kind that grew over the rubble of the old and lifted caps like mushrooms to the stars above, bathing in the pure light of the twinkling jewels above.

And in the back of his head, one last reasonable shred of his brain knew one thing for sure: he was tripping his brains out.