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Thursday, November 24, 2016

Bartholomew Bumble's Midnight Tumble, Part Three



TWO SEEKERS


“O! Where have you been, my son?”
Where have I been, my mother?
I have trod the winding paths
To the mighty wood down yonder way.
The strange and wonderful mysteries
Of leaf and twig and hidden mould
Have I unraveled with eye, hand, and nose.

“O! Where have you been, my son?”
Where have I been, my father?
I have seen the fields far south away,
Beasts and men beyond my ken
Have I descried in warmer climes
And have untangled the web of life;
And yet yearn I further and more.

“O! Where have you been, my husband?”
Where have I been, my wife?
I have survived war and strife
And come wandering home to you
To tell of courage and fear,
And of wrath and of mercy,
And of blood spilled, and of life renewed.

“O! Where have you been, my father?”
Where have I been, my child?
Why, I have seen realms in bliss,
And white towers and sparkling fonts,
And men and women, tall and proud,
And things of which other men only dream,
And have seen the night and the day.

“I have seen more than you, Old Man!”
“How can this be, Young Man?”
I have sat, wrapped in shrouds of thought
And turned my own soul inside out,
Flowed like streams through countless dreams.
I have BEEN the rain and the sun.
I have BEEN the earth and the stars.







INTUSSUSCEPTION

When Bartholomew Bumble came to again, it was with a start and a gasp, as if he had broken out of a nightmare because he sensed danger. But he saw only darkness and a sliver of light coming through a narrow crack and shining onto—a desk, a carpet, and several boos that sat on shelves. What? Was it over now? He sat up and massaged his bruised forehead, nose, and chin.
            “No,” said a voice from somewhere near the desk, “It isn’t over quite yet.”
            Bartholomew let out a short, sharp cry of surprise and thrust himself backward with his legs into a couple of wooden chairs that toppled, tangling up his head and arms in their legs and braces. He felt the chairs being gently removed, and he breathed: “Who? What? Who are you?”
            After a moment or two, the voice in the dark said, “Who do you think I am?”
            Still out of breath as he rolled himself onto his belly and then levered himself off the carpet, Bartholomew rasped: “Don’t be cute! Who are you? Why are you here? Where’s Linus?”
            “Linus is in the living room, where you left him,” the voice said evenly. “I am here to give you a gift. I’m not sure if it helps you to know my name’s Adam Maker.”
            “I don’t need any gifts from Adam Maker, thank you,” snarled Bartholomew. “I don’t know any Adam Maker, so it doesn’t help me to know your name.” Bartholomew was up now, fists clenched, back hunched, facing Linus’ desk.
            “How can you know I don’t have any useful gift to give you,” said Adam Maker, “if you don’t know me?”
            “I’m willing to risk losing out,” said Bartholomew.
            Adam Maker chuckled softly. “Would it help you to know I’m also God?”
            “Would it help you to know you’re crazy?” responded Bartholomew as he reached for a chair.
            “Not really,” replied Adam Maker, “since I’m sure that is true, but I’m doing what I’m doing here anyway. Would it help you to know you’re also God?”
            “I’m God, huh?” said Bartholomew, taking hold of a chair and hefting it. “What do I need you for?”
            “Everybody has to take some kind of journey,” said Adam Maker. “This is yours, to meet God, who’s just a man, and to discover that you’re also God, and just a man.”
            “It was just a rhetorical question,” growled Bartholomew. “I don’t need you for anything!” He advanced toward the desk, swung his chair wildly in that direction, and connected with something solid, but a little yielding. In half a second, there was a thud.
            Bartholomew felt his way across the room to the light switch, and then flipped it. The lights came on, revealing what appeared to be Linus Gimbal’s study, a bit messier than it should be—and missing any sign of any kind of clock or sheets or paper on a spindle. There was a blood-spattered wooden chair tottering in a corner, trying to fall over. There was no body anywhere near the chair, and no window or door had been opened.
            Bartholomew made a sour face and then shrugged. Turning slowly away, he opened the door next to the light switch and saw what looked like Linus Gimbal’s darkened living room. Turning on the living room lights, he saw the back of Linus’ skull atop the high-backed stuffed chair where Bartholomew had left him. There were empty Starmelon Orange bottles sitting on stands next to the chintz-covered chairs.
            Walking over to stand in front of his friend, Bartholomew saw Linus sitting still, eyes staring at the chair where Bartholomew had sat. The ember still glowed in Linus’ pipe, out of which came a wisp of smoke that was frozen in time. Bartholomew waved his hand through the smoke. It scattered a bit, and then froze again. It was not that Bartholomew realized he could hear no clocks ticking. Clocks were all over, but their readouts were not advancing, and they were making no noise.
            Still murderously angry, Bartholomew stumped back into the study—and found a slim, sandy-haired man, dressed in jeans and a checked shirt, sitting behind Linus’ desk. There was no sign of any injury. Bartholomew grabbed up the other wooden chair, set it upright on the floor, and plumped himself down on it.
            “Do you have any idea how many times you’ve done that to me?” asked Adam Maker.
            “I don’t fucking care!” shouted Bartholomew. “Why don’t you get out of here? She can’t have me, dammit!”
            “I’m no lackey of the Spider Queen, Bartholomew,” said Adam Maker. “I’m a friend. I’m everybody’s friend. I took the Journey, and now I find I can’t hate anyone—even people who’ve killed me with a chair in every universe in which they have chairs.” Adam Maker smiled like the rising sun.
            Bartholomew wasn’t impressed. “What do you want?” he asked. “Oh, yes, to give me a gift I didn’t ask for.”
            “You didn’t ask for it,” said Adam Maker, “but you need it, just like I needed it. I’m going to give you a Reason.”
            “I don’t need any reasons!” shouted Bartholomew. “I just want this shit to end!”
            “Well, I’m going to show you a little bit about how I know you don’t want it all to end,” said Adam Maker. “I once played Scrooge—alright, I’ve played him a trillion trillion times—so I’m gonna go a little Christmas Carol on you. Ghost of Christmas future. You’ve already had Past and Present.”
            Before Bartholomew could protest further, everything went dark again…


“Um, thank you for seeing me,” said Bartholomew Bumble.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Bumble,” said Reverend Mother Demeira, looking up from the stack of papers on her desk. Seeing his discomfort, she got up, walked around the little plywood and steel desk, and shook his hand. She was in her robes and wimple today, though he had seen her before in robes and a collar, and once in street clothes.
“Um, I’ve had a penchant for familiarity, lately, Reverend Mother” said Mr. Bumble. “If you’re willing, call me Bartholomew, or even Bart if it suits you.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Reverend Mother Demeira. “You seem more like a Bartholomew to me than a Bart, so I’ll stick to Bartholomew. And since you’re not of our persuasion, so to speak, you may drop the title and call me Demeira, if it helps you to be more comfortable with me.”
“Um, okay,” said Bartholomew, “um, Demeira. I don’t know. That seems a little disrespectful, even though I’m not of your persuasion, as you put it. You’re the biggie around here, after all.”
“I’m a human being, nonetheless, Bartholomew,” said the Reverend Mother.
“Okay, I’ll try—Demeira,” responded Bartholomew. “This isn’t easy. Nuns fly around with rulers, whacking people on the knuckles for being left-handed. They put people right in line, telling them right out that every thought and movement makes them worthless sinners, predicting years in Purgatory, or letting them know which circle of Hell they’re bound for.”
“Oh...oh, that hurts!” cried Demeira. “What horrible stories you’ve heard! But surely you’ve seen us being human, Bartholomew. There have been nuns like the ones you talk about—but there’s also the rest of us. Such a dark view you’ve taken. It’s no wonder you’ve been so reluctant to come see me.”
“I’m very sorry,” said Bartholomew. “I know it’s a stereotype. It’s no better than saying black people are stupid, lazy, and violent, even though it’s obviously not true except for a small minority of people. I don’t believe that about black people, but, for reasons that I’m still working out, I’m scared of nuns. I’m nervous around any sort of authority figure. Well, I’m nervous around people, period, but authority figures are especially fearsome.”
“I could speculate about that,” said Demeira, “but I don’t think that would be productive. Christ calls us to minister to ailments of all sorts, Bartholomew. I guess I’m the Biggie, as you put it, the Big Sister at St. Cuthbert’s, so it’s doubly or triply my calling to minister to you.”
“But I’m not, um, a person of faith,” said Bartholomew.
“You’re not?” said Demeira. “You’re surely not a person of my faith. But, Bartholomew, you’re a living human being, aren’t you?”
“I think so,” said Bartholomew.
“Well, then,” said Demeira, “something keeps you going. In a big, scary world, something has to get you out of bed in the morning. Without the possibility of something to took forward to, it’s much safer to stay in bed, maybe much more logical simply to die and get the suffering over with—than to ever get up and do anything.”
“That’s your definition of faith?” asked Bartholomew.
“That’s a definition of faith, isn’t it?” responded Demeira. “A belief that isn’t based on proof. You can’t prove it’s worthwhile getting out of bed, or even to be alive. But you’re a human. Even when you’re in the deepest depression and find yourself unable to rouse, you still think, from time to time, of getting up. Even when you’re so far down the road that you’re getting ready to commit suicide, you wish you didn’t feel the need to make the pain end. You wish the circumstances were different. You wish you were one of those people who find living tolerable. You want faith of this barest sort. And, you, Bartholomew, did arise this morning—and you came here. I submit, then, that you do have at least this modicum of faith—a mustard seed, you might say.”
“I wouldn’t say,” said Bartholomew. “But if I had to say, then I’d say more like a quantum particle, a down quark maybe.”
“Ah, Bartholomew,” said Demeira, “you give yourself too little credit. Let’s make it a charm quark. I can’t say for certain why, but I’m fascinated by you.”
“I’m just a challenge to you, I think,” said Bartholomew.
“It’s more than that,” said Demeira. “I have no illusions about giving you to Christ, if that’s what you mean. Jesus is interested in everyone, and hopeful for everyone, but not everyone is able to have the same sort of relationship with him. I’m truly a Bride of Christ. I have fallen into spiritual love with him, and I will never leave him. Even if, God forbid, I should ever divorce him and become secular again, he will always be with me. My thoughts can’t stray far from him.
“But other people can’t become fully married to Christ, even though they very much love him. They love the physical world too much. Nuns and priests are essentially the intellectuals of the religious world, the academics-who-practice. Some of us practice by being actual academics, and some of us, even when we’re not doctors, are more like doctors, getting down to the nitty-gritty, taking Christ to the streets, so to speak. But we’re all really into Christ, and the philosophy of Christ. We always want to get to know him and love him better. We’re always looking to the sky.
“But others are more grounded in the here-and-now than in the hereafter. They love Christ and want to be Christ-like, but they also love working and loving and playing and having sex and making babies. They’re just as worthy to Christ as we intellectuals are, but they live different lives. Their eyes are on a different prize. But if they maintain their religious faith, they’ll see Heaven.
“And there are others, perhaps like you, who aren’t thinking of things in terms of being Christian or not being Christian, but who are always considering what is the right way to be and the wrong way to be. They’re thinking Christ-like thoughts, but maybe they don’t know it, or maybe they have such a negative view of religion that they don’t want to admit they think Christ-like thoughts. You see, Christ is a state of mind, just like being a Buddha is a state of mind. I’m not supposed to say it, because that’s for another brand, but the Buddha was Christ-like in many ways.”
“Are you trying to convince me that I don’t have to give myself to Christ because I already have and just don’t know it?” asked Bartholomew.
“No,” said Demeira. “You don’t have to deliver your spirit to Jesus in order to be Christ-like. And it isn’t a bad thing to be Christ-like. It is merely being good, and generous, and considerate of others. The less interested you are in yourself, and the more interested you are in others, the more Christ-like you are. You’re autistic. At least you’re on the spectrum. And it’s very hard for you to commune with other souls, but you’re doing what your internal composition allows. Your Christ-like-ness doesn’t have to be perfect to be present. And I can tell by the way you’re carrying yourself today, and by the conversation we’re having, that you have become more outward. I don’t know what happened, but you’ve had some sort of experience that has altered your outlook. The very fact that you set up an appointment with me lets me know that you’ve passed through a crisis and have come out more ready to live.”
“Okay,” said Bartholomew. “If I’ve changed, it hasn’t been that much. I’m not ready to talk about that yet. I have a friend with whom I’ve been talking more lately. We’ll deal with crises and outlooks, and whatnot. I don’t know you—um, Demeira—and I can’t talk with you about such personal things.”
“Fair enough,” said Demeira. “What can you talk with me about today?”
“I’m sorry,” said Bartholomew. “I know I’m being rude.”
“You’re not being rude, Bartholomew,” said Demeira. “I know a little something about autism. We do a fair amount of social work here at St. Cuthbert’s. I know that you honor me by spending your mental resources on talking to me. I’m not autistic, but I know from autistic people who are able to communicate verbally that it’s very exhausting, to the point of being mentally, and almost physically, painful. Unfortunately, many autistic people, the ones who find it hardest to communicate, talk almost exclusively with very close family—and social workers. We’re the only ones with the motivation and education to understand—as well as a non-autistic can.”
“Well—Demeira,” said Bartholomew, “since you’re determined to be tolerant of my ways, I’ll say I’ve come here to make a judgement about you. You’re supposed to be judging me, of course, but I need to get to comprehend you a little better before I can submit myself as a candidate for the trial medicine sponsorship.”
“You have a question,” said Demeira. “I think I might be able to guess what it is. And I think you may already have guessed parts of the answer. But, for the sake of clarity, please ask.”
“You’re very patient,” said Bartholomew. “Uh, thanks.”
“You know why I’m so patient,” said Demeira. “If I were talking to you strictly as a human talks to another human, I might be irritated by now. But I know why this is so difficult for you, and why you so much need clarity about my beliefs. And, even so, Christ compels me to compassion. I will be patient until you no longer need my patience—or until lunchtime.”
Bartholomew chuckled.
“So, Bartholomew,” said Demeira, “what is your question, or your statement?”
“Um, well,” said Bartholomew. “Um, what is your view on God?”
“How do you mean?” asked Demeira.
“Is God a thing?” asked Bartholomew.
“What?” asked Demeira.
“Are you a literalist?” responded Bartholomew.
“Do you mean, am I a fundamentalist Christian,” asked Demeira, “a conservative Christian who believes the Bible is the absolute, unquestionable Word of God, that every word is literally true, that every event described literally happened?”
“Yes, that,” said Bartholomew.
“Well, that’s a big question,” said Demeira. “I’ll start by saying that God could be an entity, living outside this universe somewhere, and that I could meet him someday. I want it to be true, and I fancy it is true, but my belief is not contingent on it being true.”
“I don’t understand that,” said Bartholomew. “If the Bible and God’s actual existence are in doubt, then what’s the appeal? What makes God and the Bible something you want to base your life on?”
“Hoo, boy!” said Demeira. “That’s very personal, and huge. How can I lay it out for you without giving you my life story? Well, let’s start by saying a person has to have something to base her philosophy of living on. For me, it’s Biblical principles.”
“But why?” asked Bartholomew. “I’ve read your Bible. God’s a monster, commanding, demanding, never being satisfied, killing and destroying, telling people to kill and rape and destroy. Even Jesus says once that he wants to see his enemies lying dead at his feet. And, according to the Revelation, Jesus is going to come back someday, and he’s going to be really mad. How does this God, and his Son, appeal to you?”
Demeira’s face went red, and she backed up and sat on a nearby bench. “Oh, Bartholomew!” she said. “Your view of my God hurts.”
“I’m sorry,” said Bartholomew.
“Don’t be,” said Demeira. “I asked for it.” She sighed, folded her hands into her lap, and looked up toward the vaulted ceiling.
“Let me start at the beginning,” said Demeira, still looking at the ceiling. “God is not a monster.”
“Have you read the Bible?” asked Bartholomew.
“Enough of that!” cried Demeira. “I think you’re crossing from autistic candor into actually trying to hurt me now.”
“I’m sorry,” said Bartholomew. “It’s just that I find the statement that Yahweh is not a monster incredible.”
“Okay,” said Demeira, “I’ll work with that. Yes, in places in the Old Testament, and even in the Book of the Revelation, God looks pretty bad to many modern minds. But that’s only if you take it all literally.”
“What other way is there to take it?” said Bartholomew. “The Bible says to take it literally. At the very end it says death will come to anyone who changes even one word of it.”
“It does,” said Demeira, “but it’s a story. It’s the longest-running metaphor in the world. It’s full of truth, but it’s full of other stuff. It’s the story of a people. It’s a creation story. It’s a philosophy. It’s a book of object lessons. It’s a songbook. It’s lots of things. For that reason, it seems very flawed. It’s also the primary religious heritage of the West—from Europe, to North Africa, to Norway, to Russia, to the Americas, even to Australia. It’s our religious tradition. If I were Middle-eastern, I might be Muslim or Jewish. If I were Indian, I might be a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist. If I were Chinese, I might be a Daoist or a Buddhist. You get the picture, I hope. The Bible is a big part of my story, the story of The Beginning to The Now. There are certainly elements of the story that are extraneous to the Bible, secular history, but the Bible figures big in Western history. So, I prefer Christianity and Christ to Buddhism and the Buddha, and to Islam and Muhammad, or even to the Torah and Moses. That’s the beginning of the answer.”
“I still don’t get it,” said Bartholomew.
“Patience,” said Demeira. “I’m working on the answer you need.”
“I’m sorry,” said Bartholomew.
“Please stop saying that!” snapped Demeira.
“Saying what?” Bartholomew said, “Oh, um, okay.”
“Hm,” said Demeira. “I’m sorry, too. Even I am not a perfect Christian. I lost my patience for a moment.”
“It’s okay,” responded Bartholomew. “My father once said I could piss off a preacher. And so I have.”
Demeira laughed. “Thank you,” she said. “I needed that.”
“Okay,” said Bartholomew. “Um, you’re welcome.”
“Alright,” said Demeira. “The best approach is to say to you how I see God—beyond the Bible. The Bible is God’s story, or the story that Middle-easterners have written about their relationship with God. At least it’s the story that has been widely adopted in the West.
“But this story is a story. It was written by people and contains their understanding of God. We are not the people who wrote the Bible. Nobody alive, even the most ardent Orthodox or Hassidic Jew, is a Biblical author. That is, no one alive really has the mindset of the people who set the Bible down in words.
“We have different ways of understanding the world now. Some of these come to us because the Bible has been filtered through the experiences of various peoples. Understanding of the Bible is altered by the religions that various peoples held before they became Christianized. It is altered by the lives that nations have led since becoming Christianized.
“Aside from that, we can’t take the Bible literally as words passed directly from the mouth of God to the human ear and then set down perfectly for us to read. Despite what some fundamentalists will tell you, there are flaws in Biblical understanding of the world, and there are places where something said in the Bible conflicts with, or even outright contradicts, something else. If we insist on the literalist view, we become legalists. We nitpick the Bible just as lawyers nitpick secular law. We put the Bible constantly on trial and we appeal to the Bible to solve our problems for us. But we come up with variable solutions, cherry-picking the Bible for the words that seem to back up our own, human-based opinions of what to do.
“That’s not what the Bible’s for.”
“It isn’t?” asked Bartholomew.
“No,” replied Demeira. “The Bible is al Qaeda.”
“What?!” cried Bartholomew. “The Bible is a terrorist organization?! A nun can’t be saying this to me!”
“Settle down, please,” said Demeira. “I don’t want hospital security to think I’m in any trouble.
“I said that just to wake you up. Al Qaeda had a meaning before terrorism, you know. It is The Base. That’s what the Bible is: the base. It is a foundation for meditation. You learn the ins and outs of the story, and then when you need to calm yourself and/or focus your thinking, you recall the passages that you believe will help you. The Bible is timeless in that way. It has something to say about any ethical, moral, or spiritual difficulty, and if you know what it has to say, you use the appropriate passages as a base for meditation. In that way, you’re led toward the good thing, the right thing to do. When you use the Bible legalistically, you lead it to your solution: it doesn’t lead you, and it doesn’t set you off on the right road.”
“I’m not sure that helps me know your view of God,” said Bartholomew.
“No?” said Demeira.
“Not really,” said Bartholomew. “And it’s really hard to reconcile. Although I have learned to deal with metaphor, my thinking still tends to be literal. I guess that’s why I’m not a good writer or artist, and I suppose that’s why I have so much trouble with religion. I object to religion on a moral basis, and that, I suppose, is because I find too many flaws and contradictions, and seeming admonitions to evil and examples of what seems evil to me in the various Bibles. It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of taking the Bible as metaphor and story—and especially as a basis for meditation. But then I don’t meditate.”
“Of course you do,” said Demeira. “But you probably think of meditation as sitting in the lotus position and thinking of flowers or blanking your mind. There are many kinds of meditation. Merely sitting quietly and thinking is a form of meditation. Even having a conversation with yourself, though some people think that is insanity, is a kind of meditation.”
“Hm,” said Bartholomew. “I’ll have to consider—meditate on—that.”
“But that still doesn’t answer your question, does it?” asked Demeira.
“No,” said Bartholomew. “And it’s important to me to know what your view of God is. I’m very concerned not to be a hypocrite. If I take help from a religious person whose views are too far away from my own, I’m worried that I’ll be a hypocrite. I’m worried that I’ll be endorsing points of view that do more harm in the world than good. The friend I talk to says I shouldn’t concern myself about this, that I inadvertently support all kinds of points of view just by buying a bottle of soda pop. But my view is to do no harm—or at least to do as little harm as I can do without harming myself.”
“Hm,” said Demeira. “That’s the Satanist view, at least the one out of LaVey’s Satanic Bible. It’s not an evil view, or a particularly good view. It’s even a pretty common view among humans. But I think you’re a person motivated by motivation. That’s pretty common among people with autism. I think you’re looking for a reason to do better than just doing no harm. Otherwise, I don’t think you’d concern yourself too much about my point of view about God. You’d just look at what we do here at St. Cuthbert’s, and you’d judge whether, on the whole, it’s better than it is damaging. You want to know what we’re working toward, what kind of view we’re promoting, whether we’ve got it right or wrong. I suspect you very much hate being wrong, and you think the wrong will somehow rub off on anybody who has contact with it. You want to live, but you’re afraid to do it the wrong way. That’s a very legalistic way of seeing things.”
“Ouch!” said Bartholomew.
“I’m sorry,” said Demeira, smiling.
“Um, touché,” responded Bartholomew.
“Alright,” said Demeira, “let’s get to it at last.
“For me, and for most of my Sisters, God doesn’t have to be real. He doesn’t have to possess flesh, bone, and blood, or the ethereal equivalent of these. He doesn’t have to be a pulsing light, and He doesn’t have to have a throne. He doesn’t have to be a He—or a She—or an It. These are human labels, and they don’t have to apply to God. I say He, because He was taught to me as He: He is traditional and commonly understood.
“God doesn’t have to have a name—except that humans need to call Him something.
“God is the Lasting Good, the Inviolable Right.
“We have made grievous errors over the centuries in our conceptions of Him, but this is more attributable to Time than to any of His overriding characteristics. Our ideas of Right and Wrong, God and the Adversary, have mutated, but some ideas are bedrock and have not shifted. Almost all religions agree that murder is wrong, that rape is wrong, that theft is wrong, that dishonesty is wrong. They may vary somewhat in their definitions of those wrongs, but they nonetheless agree on the rightness. Almost all religions agree that helping the helpless is right and good, that cooperation in our daily struggles is good and just, that evil must somehow be held at bay, that love and compassion are the means to achieving goodness. The trouble with religion really starts when some people focus on the bad stuff, the parts of the story that tell about wars, and the way some people in the story have dealt with what they see as unrighteousness. The legalists take the existence of these passages within the story as an endorsement of the acts that most people take as violent, retributive, or just plain hard-nosed. They forget that the Bible was written by people who saw the world in those terms. The lives of these people were hard, and their views were naturally, therefore, more black-and-white, more conservative. They saw a world in which all people who were not them were against them, so they saw a world in which you’re either for us or against us—and if you’re not us, you’re probably against us. Those who are against us are unrighteous and bad—because we are us, and God is with us—because we are us.
“But God, that which is good and right, predates us, stands outside the universe in that respect. Goodness and rightness are concepts. They have no tangible reality. There is no chemical or energetic code specifically for them that we know of. They are a meta-reality. They represent a consciousness about existence. Chemical creatures have become aware of goodness and rightness, but chemicals and energies contain no inherent right and wrong. Thus, naturalistic science can say little of these things. They aren’t testable under laboratory conditions, and they are too subjective for a scientist to select out biases. What seems good and right in some situations might not be good and right at all in other situations. These concepts are currently left to religion and philosophy to deal with.
“But as much as God, as a Concept, stands outside the physical universe, He is also within it. We ephemeral creatures can think about Him. We can recognize Goodness and Rightness. We can receive him or reject Him. We do acts in this world based on our acceptance or rejection of Him. He is a concept that grows out of us, grows from an infantile comprehension to an ancient one—and we don’t really know what stage of life our combined comprehensions of Him have reached—even as He is independent of us. He has, in our minds, evolved with us, but since he also stands outside of us and our universe, outside of space and time, there is a perfect understanding of Him waiting for us—but we may never know when we have achieved this perfect understanding. So, God is always waiting on us, and we are always grasping at Him. That is the Mystery that compels us. We don’t think we’ll ever achieve perfect understanding, and we don’t need to. The consequence for us Compassionate Sisters of St. Cuthbert is that since we don’t think perfect understanding is possible, we don’t expect it. We don’t expect those we serve to get even close to it, since we don’t require it of ourselves. We work on that ethic. There are vows we have taken that we believe support that ethic. But we don’t expect you to adhere to those vows. That is our role in life, not yours.”
“So,” said Bartholomew. “I’ve been judging you. You’ve also been judging me. Have you come to any conclusions?”
“Have you?” asked Reverend Mother Demeira.
“I asked first,” said Bartholomew.
“Yes, but you are the applicant,” said the Reverend Mother. “If I had time, I would have explained our outlook to you even if you weren’t looking for our help. But since you are, I must think about why your candidacy for our sponsorship outweighs the candidacy of others. I find I like you, but that isn’t enough. While you want to know if our outlook is compatible with your view of how things work, we want to know what kind of good actor you’ll become. It’s sad, but our budget, or lack thereof, forces us to think economically. We want the most bang for our buck. Because we are who we are, the definition of ‘bang’ for this purpose is good works you’re likely to do in the world.”
“Um, well,” said Bartholomew. “I’ve had this incredible experience. You might call it a miracle, or you might call it the work of the Devil. I couldn’t possibly describe it to you in the time you have, it almost being lunch-time, which you are bound to respect if I understood your earlier remark. I’m determined to write down as much of it as I can clearly remember before it becomes too painful for me to continue. So, if it helps your decision, that’s my dedication.”
“That’s interesting,” said Reverend Mother Demeira, “and I’ll take it into account. I’ll discuss this with my Sisters, and we should have a decision for you at the beginning of next week.”
“Well, um, thank you,” said Bartholomew. Without ceremony, he got up, exited the hospital, and began his long journey home.




UNWANTED APOTHEOSIS

“I don’t believe anyone has a lock on The Truth. There are lots of people shouting, “Believe what I believe!” and “You have to take it on faith!” Many believe whatever they believe too wholeheartedly to be reasoned with. Many believe with terrified hands clamped in a death-grip around their beliefs. Many don’t quite believe, but are afraid not to believe.”—Kam Hijat

“I am become space, the template from which all else derives, the architect and the archetype of a revolution which both thrills and appalls me,” Falmath said to himself <Derisive Mode> after Cuthaur, now his Prime Aide, left the room. He repeated it in Poetic Mode: “al-el-gwaling-eradamaion-ganding-aeand-taurar-erad-ertha-hafirer-anderion.” <Continuing in Derisive Mode> “I’m not sure it sounds any better as a poem. It certainly doesn’t feel any better.”
Falmath’s Hill now felt more than ever like Falmath’s Howe. Oppression was not a potent enough word—not deep enough, not wide enough, not narrow enough, or strong enough. He had never felt less like the person for this job, or less certain that it was a task fit to be undertaken.
Tomorrow he would go to Elfostimbar, where Nuinlaur had had a cottage next to the sea-spray and had composed the most powerful of his poems. He would meet with the delegation from forty-eight nations of the Dothrim—only about a quarter of their one-hundred eighty-seven independent countries—and it would be a long, contentious day. His patience would quickly wear thin, and by the end of the meeting, he would use his new talent to cajole them into signing the Integration Treaty he and his counselors had written for the occasion; if Imragoth, with his ancient and stubborn weight of years couldn’t resist the Irresistible Voice, certainly even the most intractable of these Wild People couldn’t. The use of the Voice was morally questionable. But the worst part of it was that he knew he was thereby sentencing several of the emissaries to death, and worse yet, he was to be the cause of wars that might last for centuries. That was morally monstrous. Were the benefits of the Wild Genes worth it all? Wasn’t what he was about to do just as much a pretension to godhood as what Imragoth had intended to do to him—and with repercussions magnified millions-fold, possibly billions-fold? Yet, wouldn’t humankind as a whole benefit? There must have been at least twenty abominable Dothir conquerors and dictators who had thought the same thing when carrying out their pogroms and their eugenic sterilizations. Did higher intelligence justify it? This was an experiment of colossal proportions. On one level it seemed simply the usual modus operandi of the Kemin Gwaros: hypothesize, experiment, observe, and report. On another level it seemed the most terrible act that any human had ever committed himself and his planet to. And on yet another level it seemed the quickest and most benign way to both achieve the ends of the Kemin Gwaros and repay the Wild People for what had been done to them and their ancestors. The only other option was to leave things as they were, to continue the path of Kemin Gwaros contented and uncontested monstrosity, to allow the Wild People to bleed themselves and their potential away in pettiness and chaos while the Kemin Gwaros looked on like a deistic God who set the world in motion and then watched it spin away—and with much less right than a God to do it.
He arose from his official desk. “Ambassador to the Outer Peoples and Master of the Exchange,” he mumbled to himself <Derisive Mode>. Ordering a thermos of hot tea and a bowl of cat kibble from his food vendor, he took it up to the roof garden of his Hill, and Meistag, his cat, followed him. Together they curled up on their cushioned stone bench in the fading sun and awaited the stars. Meanwhile, Ambassador Falmath’s new house guards stood like silent statues at their various stations on the estate. He kept his gaze directed at the sky so he wouldn’t see them.
Elfostimbar was different from the other Kemin Gwaros cities Falmath had seen; it was the most ancient of their cities. The virtuals he had experienced had shown him the longhouses like overturned ships with windbreaks like sails on tall masts. As the ambassadorial autopod armada came in on a zephyr to the temporarily quiet sea-side, he saw the chaos of the streetless community, and it was as if a fleet of modern warships was about to clash with a ghost fleet arisen out of the ancient past.
The sun peeked over the horizon of the heavily cloud-laden sky, and dawn’s rosy fingers stained the fleet of sails the red of new blood. If he had been a Dothir he did not doubt that this omen would have driven him back to his house, where he would lock himself in and build barricades that only a hydrogen bomb could dislodge. But he realized that all omens were false: it was people, not gods, who decided the fate of people. Yet, though there were no gods in his philosophy, it might be that there were creatures possessed of powers even greater than those of the Kemin Gwaros. He wondered again about the Unseen Hand which had shown up in his calculations. Who was writing this chapter of the Great Book? He hoped it was he—and was prepared to be relieved at the thought that it might be someone else. “Enough of that!” he said to himself <Derisive Mode>. “That’s Dothir thinking!” And then again it might be good practice to think like a Wild One, he thought. The autopod’s computer queried him, but he did not respond, and it went on flying him to the Greathouse of the City Council.
The Dothrim delegates were a cacophony—of color, of sound, of textures, and of smells. As Falmath entered, and they stood to receive him, they babbled their salutations in their multitude of tongues. He suddenly understood Imragoth better, for it sounded to him like the calls of so many jostling beasts. These were dangerous creatures with subtle minds, not intellectually equal to the Kemin Gwaros, but far more numerous. And their technology was not so far behind that they could do his people no harm. Several of the delegates had had to be relieved of their sidearms.
Their weaponry, of course, was not where the primary danger lay. They were wild. It was not merely the chauvinism of the Kemin Gwaros to say so. At the beginning of the selective breeding program of Ranimir it was only the most disagreeable of men and women who were banished into the wild. As the program became ever more narrowly sophisticated and selective, those who were put out from the Kemin Gwaros, though they were not necessarily cutthroats and confidence artists, ended up in the hands of the worst of the worst, those who had had the greatest abilities and the strongest drive for self-preservation. Although there were exceptions, most of the nations of the Wild People were dominated by cruel dictators or by criminal gangs. Empires among the Wild People were fleeting: everyone could fight, and everyone wanted to fight.
As he entered the great hall, Falmath held his hand palm outward in the sign of fellowship, but his face was stern as a king of kings as he strode to his chair. It would not do to show warm friendliness, or to blur the borders of formality, among such people. They were reportedly omnivores, and many seemed even to be thoughtful, insightful beings, but the wolf was very strong in them, and something right down in his genes warned him to beware the predator minds which had stalked the evolution of the Kemin Gwaros. Yet his rational brain reminded him that the Kemin Gwaros had done this to the Dothrim—and to themselves—and it was now time to make some attempt to set things right.
He sat down in the circle of hard-padded, low-backed chairs at the dawn-side of the hall, and the new sun gave him for a few moments a proper annulus of golden fire. He had waited for precisely this moment—a god come down from the sun to deliver blessings or mandate war. The moment would not last long, and it wasn’t meant to. It would not be wise to overplay Kemin Gwaros mental superiority.
“You all know how I am called,” Falmath said, using the common Trade Language that most of the Wild People knew well. “And you have been made familiar with the culture of my people. I will not lie: we have not told you all. And we are certain that, having no reason to trust us, you have not told us all concerning yourselves. But it has been made known to me that not all of you are sufficiently familiar with one another. Despite your transportation technologies and your communications systems, I understand that many of your nations do not speak to one another. Well, for the purposes of this conference, that will not do. So I ask you, starting at my left hand, and going clockwise, to announce your names, your national affiliation, and to tell us what you will of the cultures you represent.”
The delegates had obviously not anticipated this request. Many of them were quite disconcerted, and some were openly hostile. They began talking all at once, some of them even shouting at Falmath that they were not going to be treated like children having their first day at school. Mentally turning up his volume dampener implant, he calmly folded his hands in his lap and waited them out. This sort of behavior was expected of Wild People, and they did not disappoint. He did not know how he was ever going to break through such barriers of willful ignorance without using his special talent. But there was a motivation for him to try: if the mighty mind of Falmath could be defeated by the fumbling madness of these people, the Kemin Gwaros were doomed in the end, and the new course of their culture would prove their greatest folly.
Finally, confounded by his mute sufferance, the uproar quieted itself. He smiled at them and spread his harms. “When you cannot endure such an innocent request, how can you hope to endure the Kemin Gwaros?” he asked, his deep voice rumbling like an earthquake thanks to an amplifying implant. “We have finite patience for the antics of those who wrestle for power. We have brought you here to share with you our bounty. But we will share only with those who understand sharing. Greed has no place among us, and we have no thought for personal power—only the power to be Kemin Gwaros, the Seekers-in-the-Hollows.”
His words had a strange effect on the assemblage. And he again felt that he was inadequate to this task; the wildness was stronger in him than in any of his people, but he was, in the last analysis, very much a Kemin Gwara. The emissaries glared at him with a venomous hatred that he felt as a sort of mental asphyxiation. He had to fight himself with every erg of his willpower to keep from leaping out of his chair and bolting for the doors of the hall and then to the outer portal, where the fresh, free air of the sea awaited him.
Falmath’s mind raced to understand. What had he said, except the truth as he saw it? The key was fear and mistrust. He had made his people superior through his choice of words. That was it. They knew it was true but did not want to believe it or to even acknowledge the possibility. To do so was weakness among the untrusting and untrustworthy.
He arose and left the room, and before he reached the doors, they were murmuring. As he strode down the hall beyond, the murmuring turned to shouting. It took him about twenty minutes to return, and when he stepped again through the doorway he was clad in some form of heavy clothing which covered him from head to toe, except for eye-slits and a mouth-slit. Another of his kind followed him in, carrying one of the semi-automatic side-arms they had confiscated from the delegates, as well as an assault rifle. They silenced themselves immediately and stared, certain they were all about to be massacred.
Falmath opened the wide, double sliding door that looked on the sea-strand and positioned himself in the middle of the vista. In came a troop of black-clad Kemin Gwaros carrying shields seemingly made of the same stuff as Falmath’s clothing, and they stationed themselves between Falmath and the delegates. His audience was puzzled, but they said nothing.
Falmath waited for about a minute, until he could sense the mounting tension across the shield-barrier. “First!” he cried. The delegates fell to the floor, and some pled for their lives. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. “Now the rifle!” Falmath’s voice shouted. The automatic rifle barked five times, five bursts of three shots each. The smell of expended gunpowder wafted across the room, driven in by the rising wind from the sea. The distant tide could be heard flushing landward.
The shield-bearers removed themselves, and the gunman stalked from the room. Falmath stood right where he had planted his feet, a scattering of flattened bullets lying about him. “Gentle-folk,” he said, “rise up. Do you understand so little about us that you think we have brought you here to murder you? Rise up and see what I have done.” Some with obvious trepidation, they arose and smoothed their rumpled clothing, recomposed themselves, attempted to recover their shattered dignity. They stared in disbelief. White-haired Madame Lantuille even had the temerity to say: “It was a put-on! Don’t believe these tricksters! Their witchcraft is only a sham!”
“Falmath?” said a square-shouldered Kemin Gwara standing in the hallway.
“She needs to satisfy herself, Omand,” he responded.
Omand left and came back, carrying a large-caliber handgun. Reluctantly he handed it to the elderly woman. “Please,” said Falmath, “inspect the weapon.”
She went to a side-table and disassembled the weapon, even to the point of removing the bullet from a cartridge and tasting the gunpowder. Satisfied, she reassembled the handgun and put the nine remaining cartridges back into the magazine and snapped the magazine in. Without hesitation, she firmly grasped her weapon, swung around, and fired all nine rounds dead into Falmath’s face. Each time he was hit, his head shook, but when she ran out of ammunition, he removed the headpiece and smiled, all his teeth still intact. “If we wished the other peoples of the world dead,” he stated, “you can see that we could easily withstand your weak weapons, and with our own far mightier weapons, we could destroy you.” He paused to let that sink in. “Do you still doubt that when I tell you what we will and will not do, what we will and will not share, I am sincere—and well-endowed with the ability to grant my words power?”
With no comment, Madame Lantuille went to the doorway and handed the weapon back to Omand.
The delegates rearranged their chairs and re-seated themselves. “Yet,” Falmath continued, as if he had not paused, “we have not withheld our hand: we have not desired to destroy our fellow travellers.
“You have heard that we are witches, and monsters, and intellectual inhumans, and otherwise creatures lacking in moral quality. If this were true, we would have conquered you long ago and used the sweat of your brows in our service, kept you like cattle to expend you, consume you, or otherwise to control you as we would.”
Once again he had erred. He had got their attention, and then incensed them again. He had momentarily reached the most rudimentary reasoning of these people, but, beyond that, he could not understand them. “Long ago, my ancestors did you a bad turn. They cast your ancestors out from us, and that deed has led to this pass.”
Some of them were stunned. Others shouted their outrage. Mei-wi-magh of Hai-fu even laughed, saying: “What? Us descended from a race of beautiful demons? Lantuille is right: this is an absolute sham!”
Madame Lantuille did not share this opinion any more, however. She had shot Falmath with the same gun that had dropped an elephant on one of her famous hunts. Falmath had barely felt her shots. What else could the delegates do but believe the claims of this ambassador? Why, if he was not lying, had these Kemin Gwaros creatures chosen this particular time to re-establish contact with those they claimed to have cast out, and with the overture of the offering of technological gifts? Did they know of The Project? Did this mean that the successful product of The Project could really fulfill its promise? But how could they know? If they did have that information, the best thing to do now was to make some sort of accommodation with them, deflect their suspicions. She said nothing yet, however, and waited to learn what Falmath could and would do with the other delegates.
Sitting in his pose of beatific patience, Falmath waited for the emissaries to once again bring themselves under control, and, after what seemed an interminable intermission, they did. He was as surprised by this reaction as he had been by the previous one. “Surely,” he said, “you foreparents did not hide this from you. You are us, and we are you. Even if we did not trust the tales handed down to us by our forebears, we have the genetic evidence to prove it.”
“You’re claiming to know the meaning of genes!” Mei-wi-magh laughed. At least, Falmath thought, the idiot is apparently jovial. “I suppose you also know the stars by their personal names and hold dinner parties with them.”
Unable to help himself, Dannan Braidhe of the Wellions muttered: “Genes? What in the name of Withycambe are genes?” His timing was unfortunate for him, for their was a momentary lull in the renewed hubbub, just as he began to speak. Several of the delegates chuckled, and Mei-wi-magh laughed uproariously. Some others, however, appeared to be just as puzzled as Emissary Braidhe.
“Genes,” Falmath explained, “are composed of deoxyribonucleic acid molecules, and they determine all our physical traits, from the color of our hair and skin to our ability to form synaptic connections in our brains. Experience gives us hue, so to speak, but genetics provides us with texture and constitution.”
“Pseudoscientific babble!” cried Tunbath of Aligast.
“Atheistic heresy!” shouted Nelvat Fro of the Laingan Alliance.
“Worse, gentle-people,” said Mei-wi-magh, chortling. “It is a clever ploy to keep us off-guard, to unbalance us, until this strange creature can surreptitiously slip in its true agenda. We will not guess its actual intentions until long after the meeting. After that, of course, it will be too late for those of us for whom honor is a guiding principle.” As he said that, he was staring directly and contemptuously at Lady Gidjo Ihan of Hai-kam. She glared daggers back at him, but did not retort.
It seemed like contention, but Falmath began to sense a glimmer of community developing amongst them—aimed squarely at him as the representative of the feared and hated Kemin Gwaros. It would be a dangerous course, but perhaps he could cement that xenophobia into something he could use. Manipulation! his mind cried. The commonest tactic of the Dothrim when theft, murder, and war won’t serve. Better to fall on your sword now, urged his churning mind, than to speak without truth, “Very well,” he conceded—again. “I will not debate with you. Instead, I will incense you yet another time.
“I came here with pity in my heart for those we had put out from us, whom we had left to their own devices in a hard world. And I knew that they had built for themselves societies, after a fashion, and so hoped to be able to reason with them. But they will hear none of it, and complain rather of being treated like school-children, and they say they are being manipulated into hanging themselves with their own ropes.
“I am contemptuous of you all! I am tempted to tell you all to go and find the self-created Hell that awaits you at the end of your miserable lives!
“But I came here to make you an offer, the proffer of a gift beyond price for you and for the Kemin Gwaros. We want your genes, and you want access to our technologies—our stuff which apparently runs on witch-magic! My mind cries out that I should never let you have access to one jot or tittle of what we have. Only your insipid and delusory gods know the evil uses to which you would put it.
“I am duty-bound to make you the offer in spite of my misgivings.
“If you will allow us to come among you and study your populations, and to take genetic samples from those who interest us, there are scientific advances we will give in return which will increase your knowledge in the fields of food production, medicine, engineering, chemistry, communications, and even self-governance.
“There. I have made the offer, but you will refuse. You school-brats jostling for position and grasping for riches will not accept, even to save yourselves from the eventual destruction your evil Project will rain down upon you.” Madame Lantuille and a couple of others gasped involuntarily. “You will refuse because you fear the Kemin Gwaros, and because you fear each other even more. I can only guess that this is because you understand one anothers’ motivations.
“And you should refuse: accepting will only make you more like us, and we don’t really want you in our little club if you won’t place nicely.
“Did you know that we had devices more powerful than your little Project over three centuries ago? Now, we have devices that can be delivered without the aid of aircraft, and which are ten thousand times more powerful than your pitiful Project. We have scores of them, and can build hundreds more in mere weeks, if we decide we need them. Last month, I personally commissioned a device which will be able to turn our planet to dust and bitter remembrances—and the Kemin Gwaros will be the only ones left to experience those bitter remembrances. And, surely, given what I see here today, we will need to use the thing.
“I’ve decided we must rescind the offer. We don’t need anything from you after all. And you don’t need us. Soon you’ll cause your own destruction, fighting amongst yourselves in fear that one or more of your little nations has made a deal with the horrible Kemin Gwaros. We’ll have to leave this planet, which will be nothing more than a radioactive cloud. So long—and thanks for all the pretty explosions!” He arose, drew himself up to his full and very impressive height, and began to make his dramatic exit.
Falmath fully intended to leave, to shoulder off this irritating yoke which he had helped to place upon himself. But, as he reached the threshold of the hallway, Madame Lantuille said, with little sincerity, but nonetheless hopefully: “No, Emissary Falmath. Please do not leave just yet. We have perhaps been foolish to outright reject your magnanimous offer. If you will return, we can perhaps make some sort of accord which will be of benefit to us all.”
He was alert to her treacherous nature. She had known of The Project, he was certain, as did some of the others, notably the sardonic Mei-wi-magh of the influential nation of Hai-fu. Now, Madame Lantuille sought to find some leverage she could use to somehow keep the Kemin Gwaros open to attack by the little atomic device her cabal had conjured up. He wondered if she comprehended how he had known of the thing, since his knowledge was quite obviously a shock to her and the seven others he was sure were in on the plot.
His voice had not reached the level of potency he had used with Imragoth, but it had held them rapt while he insulted them and threatened them. Combined with Madame Lantuille’s insidious maneuvering, it had achieved a quality of desire in the delegates. There is was! That was the key to them! Their minds were locked onto the idea that they would not be led or coerced, and he could now open that lock. Secretly, they wanted to be led, to eschew responsibility for the actions they took in this world of ignorance and savagery, but they could not allow themselves to know that they were being led.
Was it moral to use such an advantage? They had reached the state at which they were open to obedience of all but the most objectionable of his commands, and they would believe themselves to have been clever in manipulating him. He had used the tactic all savage rulers used to make their subjects obedient: threat of annihilation. Could he employ such methods and yet remain essentially Kemin Gwaros? And, having no choice but to accept what he had done, would the Kemin Gwaros be changed into a race of tyrants? There must be another answer.
The other answer, the only one he knew, was the one the Kemin Gwaros had always used among themselves: the truth. He would have to take care how much of it he unleashed upon them at any given time, and he would have to be extremely circumspect in the manner of presentation, but the truth could serve here. Making use of the dramatic pause his reflections had provided, he remained with his back in the doorway, but responded: “Madame Lantuille, do you suppose that I mistake you? You cannot deceive the senses of even the dullest of the Kemin Gwaros, Madame. Those of the assembled dignitaries from your multitudinous nations who did not know of The Project should be told of it, and how you hope still to find a way in which we will be vulnerable to it.” At last, seeing his moment, he let loose the fullness of his Voice of Command: “Tell them!” His voice seemed to boom and roll and echo round the room like the pounding surf outside the Greathouse.
Breathing hard, Madame Lantuille stood up and said, perforce: “We are nearly ready to test our first atomic device at Kander Massif in the Antarctic. It will use the power of the split atom to create a destruction the likes of which you can scarcely imagine. One-hundred thousand tons of trinitrotoluene set off all at once in the same location would be roughly equal to the potential of this device.” Embarrassed and angry, she resumed her seat and hugged her arms to her breast.
At least six of the delegates seemed unaware of what the devil an atom was, but they had heard of the destructive power of TNT. The other thirty-five of them (excluding those who had been in-the-know) were in a state of shock.
They said nothing—just sat and stared. There were so many questions they should have asked, so many suspicions they should have voiced, but they were unable: they were caught between the terrible revelation and Falmath’s compulsive power.
Falmath allowed the silence to pound against their hearts and minds while he pondered the idea that some of these Dothrim had been able to suspend their mistrust and hate long enough to cooperate in the effort to create a device they hoped would be powerful enough to destroy his own people. The only way these people could be made to cooperate was to present them with a fear that outweighed all their other fears. It may have been an irrational fear—after all, the Kemin Gwaros had largely stayed out of the affairs of the Wild World for several centuries—but then most of their terrors were of the absurd sort. If one opened the door to their psyche with the key of terror, one found a room full of cowering monsters, and an infinite number of further doors. And if one were to attempt to open any of those portals, the ravening dreads would leap out to get what was beyond before it could get them. They would attempt to destroy anything that was in the unseen room, and they would thus fill the room with ghosts and regrets that would feed and intensify their dreads.
Well, he had made his way into the place of greater dread, one unseen room among many, and had brought the others with him. And he wondered if it was moral and productive to present them with a yet greater fear so that they would feel the need to rally together against it. He needed to occupy their minds with a problem great and dire enough to forestall their wrath and their questions until they could be fully inculcated with the Kemin Gwaros Way—until they could become Kemin Gwaros.
How could he do this without lying to them? And he must begin soon or loose his momentum. Any number of threats could have performed this function with his own people. But these Wild People would require a menace of such magnitude that even the most irrational could not ignore it.
“How much do you trust the coalition of nations which has ‘come together’ to manufacture The Project?” he asked rhetorically. “Suppose they were to exterminate the Kemin Gwaros, and suppose the Kemin Gwaros truly were your enemies. What then would these people who were possessed of such a weapon do? There are seven nations involved in The Project—and one-hundred eighty countries that would make excellent new targets—and with the terrible Kemin Gwaros menace out of the way...
“Can your technology catch up in time to devise a useful deterrent? The Kemin Gwaros offer you the means to leap beyond such concerns. We offer technologies that will make us all great. If we go forward together, we will have no need to fear anything. If we remain apart, you will destroy yourselves. You cannot destroy us, but that will not stop the Project Coalition using its devices—and the results will be awful beyond your ability to imagine. Almost everyone—aside from the Kemin Gwaros—will perish, and those few who survive will find themselves in a world as hostile as any Hell you care to imagine—no sun, nothing to eat, cold, and loneliness. Those who come through the fiery horror will starve and grow sick, and even scavenging in the ruins will be insufferably difficult, with little reward. In order to keep alive, you will have to humble yourselves before us and plead for our aid. Will it then be of any profit for us to aid you? Almost all the genetic material we desire will have been obliterated.
“But do not sign any treaty with us in fear. Sign in hope. We all have so much to gain by it. We only lose if we cannot stand together.”
He knew he was too reasonable for them, and that if they did arrange an accord with the Kemin Gwaros, they would immediately and constantly seek some legalistic trick to get the benefits of the treaty while still flouting it. They would hope to gain advantage over other nations by being more clever in their maneuvering, and they would seek some means of defeating the Kemin Gwaros—the Kemin Gwaros seemingly had all the advantages and must therefore be eliminated before the real work of domination could begin.
These people would have to be carefully watched and herded. And his own people would bear watching. Imragoth and his retinue would have no moral problem regarding these creatures as nothing more than protoplasm, to be used for experimental purposes and then discarded. He wondered if Imragoth understood the master plan—which was to, employing the force of persuasion, do away with Dothrim thinking and Ranimirian thinking simultaneously.


“Two and a half centuries?” Imragoth asked rhetorically <Derisive Mode> “It seemed optimistic, given the barbarity and simple-mindedness of these creatures.”
“It’s not difficult to understand, Master,” said Salmar <General Mode>, his blunt face placid as a lake of ice. “As we study more and more of their genomes, we become more skilled at studying genomes and deriving new information from them. The actual genomic survey should take no more than thirty years. Convincing them that we can be of assistance to them will consume the remainder of that time. The estimate is that roughly ninety-one million of them will agree to the therapy just to keep their neighbors from gaining an advantage over them. Given all that interaction they have due to the thieving, sex-trafficking, and war, the new genes will swiftly incorporate into their population after that.” Salmar chuckled and re-devoted his attention to his computer’s holographic interface.
We and the Dothrim have become followers of that madman, thought Imragoth. There was nothing more he could do about it unless something went terribly wrong—and nothing was likely to go terribly wrong until it was far too late to change course. He could, of course, see to it that things did go very wrong, but that was not the Kemin Gwaros Way. And, there was always the chance, however small, that Falmath was correct. The primitive part of his mind, the part that the Kemin Gwaros did not like to admit was still lurking, yammered at him that the Kemin Gwaros gene pool was being irretrievably muddied. But it was not true: DNA was basically the same molecule for everyone, composed of the same smaller molecules. His species would produce some altered nucleotides and a few different simpler proteins, and the form of the race might become slightly less beautiful, but their brains would retain their current structure; his species would still be human, would it not? He had been assured that the Kemin Gwaros mind would be held sacred, left as it was, though maybe a few new functions might be added. If this made the whole race better, that was good, he supposed. And he would have some say in what constituted “better”. But it still nagged at him that overwhelming trouble was coming—and that it was inextricably, maybe inconceivably, bound up with this experiment.


“What’s the matter, Master Cuthaur?” asked Mithanamir <Inquisitive Mode>, her black eyes glittering with youthful energy.
“I seem to have developed the super-sensitive olfactory power the genetic therapist promised,” he responded <Interpersonal Mode>, chuckling and wrinkling his nose. “You reek! as I heard a Dothir say—but only in my nostrils; you actually smell the same as you always have.”
“You’re telling me that my odor has become offensive to you, Master?” she responded <Inquisitive Mode>, lowering her moistening eyes.
He studied her through his scrolling, blinking holo-display for a few moments. Then, his golden head (his hair had changed a little in color since the beginning of his transgenetic treatments) appeared around the display’s border, and he said <Interpersonal Mode>, “I forgot. Your mother was of the Wild People—I mean, Partners—and you think I make sport of you because of it. My emotions have become somewhat amplified by the treatments, but I will ignore the insult.” He smiled.
“Don’t you know how much the genes of the Partners have given us? Enhanced senses, greater muscle strength, new microbial and viral immunities, and denser ganglionic bundling. We even have developed our first strains of true clairvoyance and mind-to-mind communication. How could I hold you as anything but an equal?
“But I was born before you, and I haven’t yet adjusted psychologically to the new emotional sensitivity that is the payment for our new abilities. You don’t smell rotten. In fact, you smell quite nice—just a very intense form of nice.” He smiled again, and could see her mood brightening, which made him feel warm right down in his newly-enhanced soul.


The dive bar in Gaddin City was packed today. It was the eve of Madi-Birino Day, and starting tomorrow everyone was supposed to abstain from drinking and drugging for a week. Faith in the Ascending Divines had faded centuries ago, but the Celestial Table insisted that all the holy days be honored, and they sent Enforcers into every corner of the country to ensure that their will was obeyed. They were most particular about observing the prohibitions of Madi-Birino Day and the six days beyond. Most of the populace questioned the practices of the Celestial Table only cursorily, as was expected of a red-blooded citizen of Sammitopolo. But the truly in-the-know, those who sat in corners facing the doors, those who peeked into keyholes, those who were truly awake, knew that there was something more to all these holy days, especially this one, than meets the eye. The seven days of Madi-Birino were supposed to be a time of reflection and planning for the future, but the Awake knew that these days were a biological system flush—a week without mind-altering substances so that the effects of the hypno-drugs the Table put into the water supply could get a renewed hold on the citizenry. In the name of Celestial Purity, all outside food and drink was forbidden in Sammitopolo, and for that reason the Awake drank nothing but smuggler’s water. The Awake did not frequent bars or restaurants.
So, on one level, no one was awake in Timbol’s Tavern on Priol Street. The shared Celestial dream was a noisy one, a juke box and three televisions blaring all at once, people yacking and laughing, and it reeked of alcohol, greasy food, and the smoke of twenty-seven different species of fumaria cigarettes. A waiter and two waitresses in red and white checkered uniforms danced their way through the crowd, deftly balancing serving-platters and dodging grasping paws. The bartender and the owner seemed happy for the first time in three weeks, their slow-burning feud in a temporary truce, scanning the paying customers as they mixed and served drinks. Certainly nothing outside these walls was of any concern to them tonight.
Some moron had bumped the channel-changer for television number one, and some other moron had spilled beer all over it, so that television was stuck on Channel Six News. Scenes of train wrecks, plane crashes, people in dress clothes doing the usual puppet-dance, and women in next-to-nothing being flashed by photographers took their proper turns on the screen. Then came the long lineup of we’ll-make-you-a-superstar-if-only-you’ll-fork-over-nineteen-ninety-nine-plus-tax. Though a few of the patrons looked in the direction of the screen, nobody paid any of the nonsense any real attention, and certainly nobody could hear clearly anything radiating or spewing from the idiot box.
No one in Timbol’s heard as the news came back on with the breaking story. Images of people in hazmat suits carting bodies and big plastic containers out of various houses and businesses. Though nobody heard, the talking head said: “Last evening the Central Police conducted their first raids in the Depurification Plot. Apparently, several enemy nations, a coalition including the Dinpari Federation, Wellion, Hai-Kam, and Vittinga, have been plotting for months to overthrow the Celestial Republic of Sammitopolo. Reports say the initial wave of the attack was to be the introduction of the tainted offspring of an abduction-rape scheme that began several months ago. In a secret deal, the enemy coalition combined human and Patigilli bloodlines to create hybrid offspring that would look just like real humans. These were to be implanted in young women abducted from various locations in Sammitopolo, and then the women were to be re-introduced into our population. There they would bear and raise these offspring to become deep-cover espionage agents. The Central Police were tipped off by a few suspicious parents and began their investigations six weeks ago. Beyond this first stage of the enemy action, the Police are giving no more details at this time.” The scene switched to the standard buzz-cut, black-uniform Central Police spokesman waving his hands in the warding-off gesture and then staring at a crowd of reporters for a few moments before stalking back into Central Police headquarters. “We’re going to stay on this breaking story as the Police release more information, which Ministry of Justice Information Director Dedesto tells us will occur soon. The Ministry promises full and prompt disclosure of all details that won’t compromise the case against these young women and their foreign handlers.”
The scene switched to stock footage of various foreign religious groups holding pompous ceremonies. “In a related story, it appears that civil authorities in several countries of the Far East where it’s twelve hours earlier than it is here in Sammitopolo have uncovered similar plots against their own sovereignty. Already fifteen religious groups, the most prominent being the Tollipams and the Omnimentors, have scheduled marches on their capital cities to protest this bloodline pollution and to demand a declaration of war against the offending nations.”
The scene switched again to a regional map and some new talking head blathering on about the upcoming weather. When that was finished, the commercials came back on again. The screen flashed between yellow and red, and in black letters: “THE END IS NIGH!—Where will you be—when Manigan’s slashes prices—to blasphemous new lows?—Don’t miss the BIG SALE—all this week during the Madi-Birino—SALE-ABRATION! Manigan’s New & Used Furniture—234 South Waldor Street—and 1448 East Fannik.”
Hardly anybody in the bar noticed that the news had been on, but many eyes saw the advert for Manigan’s.


It was a small room, brick-tiled, dimly lit, and sparsely appointed, only the barest of necessities, where Imragoth had chosen to hold his final audience. Only a few of his closest associates had been invited, and the doctor and his assistants had been dismissed as futile expenditures of resources and effort. Glingil was there, and she was weeping; she had never wept before. Cuthaur was there, standing silent behind Glingil, clasping her shoulders as a gesture of solidarity. Salmar slowly stood, dark and solemn, after several minutes of whispered conference with his mentor. Falmath sat in a folding chair he had brought with him, aides banished, communications equipment turned off. As it had been for so long, Imragoth and Falmath were the two focal points of the landscape, the tower of Imragoth lying low now, but still strong, solid, and white even in its ruin, the tower of Falmath dark and foreboding, somehow hovering and unreal despite its overwhelming presence, commanding all the lands round about, troubling entire worlds, yet aloof, disconnected and unapproachable, its ramparts unreachable, therefore unbreachable.
But Imragoth could still reach Falmar, and penetrate his defenses. With a trembling hand he bade Falmar to come to him, and Falmar came, and the most powerful man in two worlds knelt like a supplicant.
“As you can see,” breathed Imragoth <Interpersonal Mode>, “the time is short. Irrational as it may be, I feel the need to satisfy myself with you, and then I can be content and let life go at last.”
“Of course, Master” responded Falmath <Interpersonal Mode>.
“You have killed me, you know,” said Imragoth with a weak smile. “I might have had another century or two in me.”
“I know it, Master,” said Falmath. “And your telekinetic power was developing nicely. No one else among us could have survived so close to a nuclear blast. In fact, none other than you within the seven-mile blast radius did survive. You are strength and perseverance to the last, Master Imragoth.”
Agony wracked his ancient form for a few seconds. “The devastation you have wrought upon the planet,” breathed Imragoth, “—unthinkable, indescribable. I saw twenty regions on my inspection tour, blasted and radioactive, devoid of all life—as I soon shall also be. Your war proceeds apace.”
“The war proceeds,” agreed Falmath.
“Why?” asked Imragoth.
“Why—the war?” asked Falmath.
“Why all of it?” responded Imragoth. “I have never truly understood your Procedure, as you call it. Your Palliative Procedure, as if you were a physician administering care to a hopeless patient. I have never comprehended the point. None of us has. Only your Voice has carried us along so far, to such extremes. Your Procedure is not an experiment, as I first thought. Yours is a Plan, foreseen and wrought out in fine detail, the master plan of a god-emperor. I would know why. Why this Plan, this orgy of destruction? The Wild World is crumbling to ruins, macerating to dust and poisonous muck. And your Plan has yet to reach its conclusion; the house of the Kemin Gwaros will also be razed at the end.” He weakly grasped at Falmath’s jacket and tried to haul him closer. “I must know the why of it!”
Imragoth was emotional. Falmath had never before seen him in such a state, and he was quite taken aback. The foundation of the house of the Kemin Gwaros is already shaken to bits, he thought. The whole structure is already falling, and you cannot see it, Master Imragoth. All of you, Wild and Disciplined alike, have paid the price of Me. And what price shall I pay? I shall go on living—for a very long time. Voices shall cry out to me, and my Voice shall lack the power to quell them. I shall yearn for the solace of extinction, but none will grant it to me, and I shall be unwilling to bestow it upon myself. I shall not account it sufficient payment, but it shall be all I have to give.
“What can I say to you, Master?” asked Falmath. “If I have not explained already to your satisfaction, how shall I do it now?”
“The morality!” shuddered Imragoth. “You have spoken of it many times, but I have not understood. If there is such a thing as evil, you have perpetrated it on a scale scarcely conceivable. No petty dictator among the Wild People, given the same resources, could have managed this. You claim Ranimir was misguided, and therefore led us into the commission of a terrible crime—and you hope to remedy it with a crime many times worse.”
“I know, Imragoth,” said Falmath. “The moral scales cannot be balanced this way—or any way. Things had proceeded too far down Ranimir’s Road. There was no means by which recompense could be paid to the Wild Ones. They could not and cannot hear us. They could not and cannot come to us and be re-joined to us. Our lost half is so long and far estranged that it cannot recognize us and long for its lost half. We cut it off, and we lost half our potential—but we couldn’t acknowledge that. We had a phantom half and thought ourselves whole, Master Imragoth. And when we finally woke up to our loss, we could only grab little bits and pieces, rags to cover our nakedness.
“Extracting genetic material from the Wild People and making it our own: this was no way to bring them back to us. It was their lives that we had made, not only their genes.”
“But you have made their lives unimportant,” Imragoth responded distantly, his eyes losing focus, his breathing becoming shallow and ragged. “Your Plan...is killing...them all off. The morality!”
“And the Palliative Plan will kill us as well, Master,” responded Falmath. “But we will not all perish. Some of the Kemin Gwaros will survive, and some of the Wild Ones will survive. We will join together out of a necessity to which all will agree. The scales will be reset. All hands will be bloodied, and none will desire again to wield the knife. But all will be equally innocent of the crime—except for me. I will take that burden, and I will bear it alone. There is a Hell reserved for me. I am creating it, and it shall have a population of one. I will sequester the guilt of the Kemin Gwaros and send them clean into a new world.”
“I...still...do not...” breathed Imragoth—and then he breathed no more.
Falmath turned his gaze upon the others and said, “Nor do I really comprehend it, but I do what must be done. To let things go on as they were would have been to allow the destruction of both ourselves and the ones we had wronged. We had grown stagnant; the only possibility we saw was ourselves. And they were growing ever more murderous—and increasing their capacity for mayhem. We would have been overwhelmed by their numbers, and if we were fortunate, there might have been a few survivors. And if our good fortune were compounded, those survivors might even have been amendable to cooperation. In that case, things would have been little different from the manner in which my Procedure is scheduled to conclude. But we call good fortune good fortune because it is not destined to be: there are a multitude of other fortunes. I was in a position to see the risk and to see the means by which to side-step that risk. That is my ill-fortune, that I should be responsible for making this Decision of decisions on behalf of the whole human species. People do it every day: they are in a place, and a time, and a situation—and they decide—and other people and creatures and things pay the cost. And now I will say no more of it, having already given the impression that I am trying to excuse myself of the Atrocity of all atrocities—which, of course, I suppose I am.”


As President of the Source Academy, Master Glingil seldom had time to visit her home at five-one-five Liminial Street these days. Her bright, cheery place, though kept in pristine condition by maintenance robots, seemed somehow askew, unfamiliar, and at the same time well-recalled, like a home in a nightmare. She had had to give away her three cats several years ago for fear they would go feral.
Glingil had decided to give up the house entirely. Maybe one of the refugee families would enjoy it. At any rate this was her goodbye day, and she had invited—or rather commanded—Falmath to come celebrate her permanent departure with her. Though Falmath was de facto emperor of the Kemin Gwaros, and though he was on very uneasy terms with Glingil, he had obeyed her summons.
They sat together in chairs facing one another in the only room of her house that was darkly-appointed: the library. The lights were dimmed and the holoprojector was in two-dimensional mode and was projecting the first page of the Falmathian hypothesis—which was now a full Theory close to becoming Law—that Cuthaur had delivered to her home centuries ago. Cuthaur was President of Carcaros Academy, a satellite of the Source Academy, and he was in the middle of a classified experiment and had had to, on the authority of the Master of the Change, decline Glingil’s summons.
“We once walked a long road together,” said Glingil <Interpersonal Mode>, “but our paths have very much diverged. When I see you now, I don’t see Falmath, the socially awkward, easily incited, brilliant theorist who needed both my mothering and my sex. I see rather a religious zealot, a desert Prophet come down from the mountain with commandments from God on High. Once I had thought that you were merely blossoming into the great leader I had hoped you would become. But you have now exceeded even yourself, I think, and you are one step from being declared a living Deity.”
“Are you certain you don’t believe in spirits?” asked Falmath <Derisive Mode>. “The spirit of Imragoth seems to be infesting you.”
Glingil was obviously hurt—another artifact of the genetic therapy so many of the Kemin Gwaros had undergone in the effort to attain new mental and physical faculties. “You see,” she responded <Interpersonal Mode>. “You’re like a divorced lover, still responding to me because of what we once were to one another, but contemptuous, ready to spew venom at the slightest provocation. But you don’t answer the challenge.”
“What would you have me say?” asked Falmath <Interpersonal Mode>. “Should I agree with you? Alright, I understand why you say what you say. I will go so far as to agree that I am much changed from the Falmath who was so close with you all that time ago. I still remember those days, and I still love you with much more than an agape love. But I do not love or despise those old days any more than I love or despise these new days. The things we did then, and the things we do now, are simply that-which-is. The course I have set is simply that-which-must-be. I am a puppet and puppet-master at the same time. The things I have set in motion control me as much as I control them. The emotional separation from you is a side-effect of the changes we’ve both undergone.”
A single tear glittering down her cheek, she said <Interpersonal Mode>, “I know it’s true. I’ve become a little Wild, but you’ve become a super-concentrated Kemin Gwara. You’ve become more Imragoth than Imragoth. But you’ve done far more than that. You’ve taken Ranimir’s Way, as you call it, to the extreme of extremes. And I am afraid for you—and for all of us. I’m afraid for me. I have become what I least wished ever to be: a bureaucrat. I’ve become one of the Nine Bureaucrats. With few exceptions, I spend all day, every day, supervising the production of a project I don’t understand, but which you insist is of the most vital importance. And I make the decisions for thousands of thousands of Kemin Gwaros who strive alongside me to satisfy your needs. Meanwhile, the Outer World burns down around us. And you assure us all that our efforts go toward putting an end to the destruction that you instigated. I’m angry! I’m used in a way no Kemin Gwara should be! And I know there’s more to it all than you will tell! Tell me now!”
Her voice had achieved a Power of Command that no other could have refused, and Falmath took some time to compose himself while beautiful, irrefusable Glingil glared at him. After a long pause, he said slowly <Interpersonal Mode>, “I can’t tell you. If I tell you, you’ll hate me, and pity me—and out of sheer terror you’ll be compelled to stop me. I can tell you only that I know the course I have set. It’s the only course that eventually leads out of annihilation for us all.”
“How do you know that?” said Glingil <Mandative Mode>. “How can I trust that? I need more than just your word on it! My own projections see nothing beyond the complete destruction of both Dothir and Kemin Gwaros. But, still, I try to trust you. My trust has worn out.” <Changing to Mandative Mode> “Explain now, Falmath!”
The quality of command in Glingil’s voice was such that, had she used it against anyone but Falmath, that poor devil would have fallen at her feet, groveling, confessing, pleading forgiveness, withering away to a husk if forgiveness was not forthcoming. Falmath struggled to lever himself out of the chair and walk away in silence, but, despite himself he still loved Glingil very much. His own voice shuddering, he responded <General Mode>: “I—have kept—two things secret: the culmination of the Procedure—and the reason for the Procedure.”
He paused to struggle against the compulsion, but, already haven given in to it just a little, and having in essence promised more, he found himself powerless to keep his secrets any longer. “Begin with the reason,” said Glingil <Mandative Mode>.
“I have an ability I’ve kept secret since I was young,” Falmath complied <General Mode>. “As I approached puberty, I began to get visions. They were brief and very disjointed, but I began to see happening around me these things I had seen in these visions. By the time I reached adulthood and was in Academic training, this visions were often lengthy and very detailed. They were more seldom than when I was younger, but now they were more profound. They always had to do with some subject I was studying or some phenomenon I was contemplating. They were like logical projections, but they were visible to me. Sometimes they were fully sensory—that is, they contained impressions of all the senses—and they often included emotional overtones. Since these visions always came to pass, I concluded that they were not mere psychic ravings, but that they were logical, that I had access to some faculty of mind that was able to construct accurate models of what was to come. But I knew that people like Imragoth would label me a psychic and banish me to the Wild World.
“I said nothing, and I disciplined myself not to react emotionally as my prognostications became true, one by one. I won Academic awards because of my visions. I managed to stave off banishment because of my visions. I developed the Theory through the use of my visions. But one of the projections began early in my adulthood and has stayed with me, developing in detail and scope, haunting me and overwhelming me. And now, it has become so consuming that I walk in two worlds: the world that contains you, and the Kemin Gwaros, and the horrors the vision has set into motion through my hand—and the world of the vision.”
Still glaring at Imragoth, Glingil commanded <Mandative Mode>: “Finish!”
Slowly, marshalling all his inner strength, Falmath responded: “No.”
Glingil cried <Mandative Mode>: “You can’t deny me, Falmath, of all people. I know you. I know there is yet more. Tell me the rest!
“You’ve taken too much upon yourself. “You’ve made decisions for all of us without consulting us.”
“I know it,” Falmath agreed <Interpersonal Mode>. “But what I have done hasn’t been totally without consent. The most knowledgeable of the Kemin Gwaros have known that I wasn’t telling all, but they kept on the course with me. Like the others, they have been become greedy for new abilities, they have sensed the need for a change in the face of Kemin Gwaros complacency and stagnation, even though they could not articulate it, fearing that such a need was illogical. And the Wild Ones—how could they consent? They are what we made them to be.”
Glingil was silent, but still very tense, for a few minutes, and then she said <Interpersonal Mode>: “But you don’t have the right. Imragoth said it as he was dying. You don’t have the right to decide for everyone.”
“It isn’t a matter of rights,” said Falmath <Interpersonal Mode>. “Everybody does things in the world. Some of those things have small consequences, some large, and some—overwhelming. And other people respond to the things everybody else does. And all this makes up a world of seeing and doing.
“How people respond depends basically on two things: the necessities they perceive, and their feelings about the things that others do. People try to respond to necessities as quickly as they believe they need to. The more evil and dire they think their circumstances, the more quickly, and the more radically, they take actions to forestall disaster. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, since people are also complacent and don’t want to see certain of their circumstances: they either can’t see a problem, or they think the problem is too big, and so they just pretend is isn’t real. But, basically, I’ve got it right.
“The point is that people do what they do. When a terrible, genocidal dictator does what he does, he needs help doing it. And other people tolerate the situation until it becomes intolerable to them—and then they take action to set things to rights. What I’m saying is that you should judge what I have done and will do against two criteria: motivation and outcome. Do I intend evil? And, will the eventual outcome of my actions, as far as you can project the outcome, yield something desirable or undesirable? These judgements are totally subjective, but, in the end, what you will do to aid me, or to thwart me, or to step aside, depends on how you feel about what I do.”


The Master Control Room for the Palliative Procedure seemed much too small to be the place from which the fate of billions was manufactured. It was dimly lit, and the two big view screens were off—both in deference to power conservation. This room, and the rooms adjacent, and the grounds round about, were packed with Kemin Gwaros scientists, technicians, artists, and academics, and with refugees of all description from all corners of the planet; Kemin Gwaros transports had been bringing them into the staging area for several days on the orders of the Master of the Change. None but a few of the technicians knew why, but all the people gathered here could feel the strangeness of the place. There was a static charge, and the air smelled slightly of ozone. Clouds had gathered outside over the multi-domed complex, and the barometric pressure was higher than humans had ever experienced before. The tug of gravity seemed to pull in two directions: toward the earth as it had always done, and toward the locked room on the other side of the Master Control Room. The people gathered here, even the very few who understood the reason for the strange conditions, were frightened, but they had been told that coming here meant final escape from the terror they had fled; they very much wanted to escape—even if final escape meant quick death, which many of the refugees were certain it would. Quick death was better than slow death by plague, radiation sickness, or starvation, and many had gathered here hoping to be granted that final mercy. None of the other refugees had any idea what final escape meant, but they hoped it meant life on some other planet that the Kemin Gwaros had discovered.
In the Master Control Room everyone hushed as the sound of three concussive blasts rang out from the adjacent room. People in that other room were screaming and moaning, and a commanding feminine voice shouted: “Make way!” <Mandative Mode>. The double door slid open, and in came a cadre of six soldiers in heavy amonglar body armor and bearing Q-rifles. At their head, dressed in a similar fashion, was Master Glingil, her long hair now close-cut in martial fashion. “Everyone except the ‘Procedure’ superintendent—leave!” she said <Mandative Mode>. “Now!” And everyone except Master Taminnon, even those who didn’t speak the languages of the Kemin Gwaros, left and jammed themselves into another room.
“Where is he?” asked Master Glingil <Mandative Mode>.
“He went through the Portal,” replied Taminnon <General Mode>.
“Come,” said Master Glingil to her escort <Mandative Mode). She then made for the doors that led to the Interdimensional Portal room, and the six soldiers began to follow.
“Wait,” said Taminnon <General Mode>. “You will not find him by use of the Portal.”
Master Glingil stopped, and said over her shoulder: “Why not?” <Mandative Mode>.
Taminnon replied <General Mode>, “He cleared the room an hour and sixteen minutes ago and told us not to come in for ten minutes. When we returned, he was nowhere to be found. The computer said he had gone into the Portal and that he had programmed the coordinates to reset themselves, and memory of the coordinates he himself used has been erased. We’ve tried every memory retrieval application we have to recover the coordinates, but we’ve been unsuccessful. He’s long gone, and the coordinates are reset to the original specification.”
“Well, well,” said Master Glingil <General Mode>, the fury fading from her face and voice. “We’ll just have to hope that he’s kept his word about going to a place worse than any Hell that could be imagined. It’s too bad. I might have derived some small satisfaction from killing him. Did he leave any message?”
“Yes, Master Glingil,” replied Taminnon <General Mode> in a tremulous voice. She told the computer: “Play Fmt twenty-two sixty-five.”
The audio system came on, and that slight power-usage and electromagnetic interference prompted the computer to warn that Portal stability had decreased by point zero zero zero three percent.
<General Mode> “Master Glingil will come to kill me and will be disappointed that I have gone beyond her reach. This message is for her.
“I’m sorry that so many have died in the making of the success of the Palliative Procedure. I’m very sorry that Cuthaur couldn’t survive it. Palliation only makes the pain less and doesn’t eliminate it altogether.
“Because of my emotional attachment to you, Glingil, and because I hold the vain hope that history will not loath me, I make one final attempt at explaining why this has happened, why I had to be the instigator.
“In my projection I didn’t see only one possible future proceeding from the time my mind involuntarily made the forecast. I saw millions of possible futures. But only one of them led to the Kemin Gwaros flourishing as a species. Only one of those potential futures led to us voluntarily and successfully embracing the Kemin Gwaros Way. Only one of those possible paths led to perpetual evolution and away from eventual stagnation and death.
“Imagine a simple scenario. Let’s say you and seven companions are traveling on a boat in a wide river. You come to a place where the river forks into four smaller rivers. You don’t like the looks of the situation, so you turn the boat to shore, beach it, and intend to spend some time exploring all your options for finding your way ahead. Unfortunately, superstitious forest-dwellers live next to the river, and they ambush you at night and kill every last one of you. Obviously, this is an undesirable outcome.
“Let’s rewind. You’re on the river, you come to the forks, and someone suggests taking the fork on the extreme right hand. You do this, and you get about a mile into the branching river, the wood-dwellers ambush you and kill all of you. Another undesirable outcome.
“Rewind again. Someone suggests taking the inner right hand fork. You do this, and you travel three miles on that river. Then the wood-dwellers let you get three miles before they ambush and kill you all. You live a little longer, but still...
“Rewind yet again. You take the inner left hand fork. You almost get to the place where the rivers begin to merge again, making the river too wide for the wood-dwellers’ spears to reach you if you stay in mid-river. Alas, your boat catches on sharp river rocks, founders, and you all either drown or are killed by the wood-people when you reach the shore. No good.
“And lastly you take the fork on the extreme left. You get through to the place where the river fully rejoins itself and float downstream for a few miles. The place where the forks merge is very turbulent, and five of your seven companions fall out of the boat and drown. But the remainder of you are able to eventually beach your boat and go out to forage for food. The wood-people decide that the god of the river has spared the three of you who remain, and they make nice with you as those favored by the god. You have had a great loss, and you have survived. What’s more, you teach the wood-people how to make boats that are much better than their rafts, and everybody profits. Even more than that, you intermarry with the wood-people and raise fine, strong children. Everyone who survives the ordeal lives happily ever after.
“That’s the choice I faced. I was presented by my ability to project with choices, and so I chose. I chose the future that seemed best for all concerned, and that should count in my favor. If it doesn’t count, I can do nothing to change that.
“I have released a retrovirus into the atmosphere which will have two effects: it will enable the Wild People to interbreed with the Kemin Gwaros, and it will cause ninety-three percent of all remaining humans, Wild People and Kemin Gwaros alike, to die within thirty-six hours. For those who remain there is escape through the Interdimensional Portal. I have selected a pocket dimension for you that contains one sun and six planets, only one of which is habitable for humans. You must escape there since I have programmed a final anti-matter apocalypse for our home planet. Twenty-three hours from now all the anti-matter we possess will be released and our planet, along with seventy-six percent of our solar system, will disintegrate.
“I have stationed six escape ships inside the pocket universe, and these will convey you to your new home planet. In case you are thinking that you can get around my plan for you, I will tell you that you cannot safely disengage our anti-matter reactors in time. Furthermore, I have caused our space fleet to be disabled to the extent that you could not, in the time allotted, fully repair a vessel large enough to convey more than a hundred people away from our planet.
“You must escape by the route I have provided. For the first time, humans in this universe will be their own people, able to make their own decisions with no outside interference. When you have a chance, review the data relating to my calculations and see if what I have said is or isn’t true.
<Interpersonal Mode> “Dammit, Glingil! I know you hate me—but I have always loved you.
<General Mode> “Lead our people to prosperity, Master Glingil.” The audio ended and the computer announced that one-hundred percent stability had returned to the Portal.
Tears pouring down her cheeks, Glingil turned to her companions and said, “You heard him. Prepare the people to enter the Interdimensional Portal. We have approximately sixteen hours remaining before all the people who are going to die of the plague have died. Then we will begin loading people into the escape ships. Don’t tell anyone what you have heard about the origin of the plague. Tell them we’re studying the matter but haven’t reached any firm conclusions; that’s almost the truth. Tell them that because of all the nuclear warfare the planet’s core is unstable and that a catastrophic event is imminent. That, too, is almost the truth. Sell it to them. You will lie today. Kemin Gwaros will lie—and at the end of it Falmath will be the hero who sacrificed himself to save us all. Do you understand? When we reach our new planet I will personally write the official history of this time.”
The others left to carry out her command. You are the most despicable hero in all of history, Falmath, she thought. And I will love you and hate you for the rest of my days.


Well, said Informal Mode, this is nothing unexpected.
Blackness—check, said Speculative Mode. Inability to move—check. Timeless feeling—check. No sensation of heat or cold—check. Inability to speak—check. Looks like we’ve made it—um, safely?
Indeed, said Outside Thought. Welcome to my demesne.
Hello, said Formal Mode.
There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here but us, said Speculative Mode.
I am The Singularity, said Outside Thought. I border all universes, even artificially-generated ones.
The Spatio-Temperoreferent is sapient? queried Speculative Mode.
Not exactly, but exactly, responded Outside Thought. I am in contact with the Spatio-Temperoreferent, as you call it—the point-existence from which all other existence derives. Thus, when I turn my attention to it, I imbue the Source—I call it the Source—with sapience.
Interrogative Mode said, Will you be the Keeper of this Hell to which I’ve sentenced myself?
No, said Outside Thought. You have made your own Hell: you are the Keeper.
Then what do you want with me? said Interrogative Mode.
You are a new universe, replied Outside Thought. I wish to know you.
I’m in a new universe, said Derisive Mode. The universe was created, and I stepped through the Interdimensional Portal into it.
Hmm, said Outside Thought. It seems to me that the super-genius doesn’t understand his own Theory.
This certainly is a Hell of my own making, said Poetic Mode, and this is only the beginning of the delightful torments I have in store for me.
Normally, I would not wish to impede your sulking, said Outside Thought, but as this situation is partly my doing, I feel I should be supportive. You know, it is a Hell, but it has equal potential to be a Heaven—or anything in between.
You’re just like the Kemin Gwaros, said Derisive Mode, always telling me I’ve got it wrong, that my attitude needs to be adjusted. It’s my universe! Adjust your attitude to me.
You do have a temper, Universe! said Outside Thought. I’m glad I don’t have to live in you. Well, it can be Hell if that’s what you wish. Maybe you’ll change your mind later, after you’ve had more time to reflect.
There is no time here, said Derisive Mode. How am I even having this conversation?                                                                                                                                               
Of course there is time, responded Outside Thought. There wasn’t, but you brought it with you. You are the substance of this universe, Universe. You are its matter, its energy, its space, its time, its gravity, and so on. Eternity here is exactly what you make of it. And, for the moment, you have selected self-sacrifice, and you are perturbed that I am getting in the way of your suffering. You meant to have a nice, long self-pity. I can leave you for a while, if you like, but I would like to ease your suffering—and even give you cause for joy, if you will have it.
Um, please don’t leave, said Informal Mode. I would like very much to know what cause there is for joy.
Alright, said Outside Thought. First, I must inform you that your data and the inferences you drew from them were not faulty. There is a will active in guiding the evolution of your former universe. It is not a condign or compassionate will, but rather it has been molding the sapient beings in that existence toward a purpose of its own. I know this intelligence; I have striven against it in many universes. I call it the Spider Queen; its webs are everywhere—almost—and its ultimate goal is to consume all of Existence. Your universe has been one of a multitude of side-projects for the Spider Queen. From these stunted universes, the ones not allowed to grow as they are supposed to, she draws her armies. Your people, in her scheme, were meant to die off, leaving only a chaotic mob of—as you call them—Wild Ones, from which she could draw fresh recruits at her leisure for her military purposes.
But we didn’t know this, said Informal Mode.
We? said Interrogative Mode.
I feel we are slowly being torn into our component parts, said Choric Mode.
Yes, said Outsight Thought. Your substance is adjusting to its new abode, filling up your universe with itself. Never fear: you will maintain your integrity. Your form will be that of a miniscule universe, but you will still be you—just an atomized you.
Hmm, said Choric Mode. Alright. I seem to be functioning as an integrated whole again. Yes. As I was saying: I didn’t have this information, and I made such awful decisions based on my belief in my projections.
I granted you your ability to make accurate mental projections, said Outside Thought. I strive against the Spider Queen wherever I find her. At least I strive against the destructive versions of her. In some universes she actually behaves as a relatively benign entity, using the personalities she steals from their rightful owners for constructive ends. I keep an eye on those Spider Queens, some of whom are Spider Kings, lest their activities stray too far toward what you might call evil, or Evil.
So you’re saying I never actually possessed projective abilities, said Choric Mode. You put those thoughts into my mind.
Not exactly, explained Outside Thought. You always had a marvelous logical ability. I helped you along a little by showing you factors that you would not otherwise have considered. Your mind constructed projections out of your own data and the data I granted you.
So, where is the cause for joy? asked Choric Mode. This all seems very sorrowful to me.
It is sorrowful, said Outside Thought. But then the condition of living brings with it many sorrows and many joys. You have been granted a glory that comparatively few ever attain.
You mean to say that I should be glad I found a way to save my people from extinction? asked Choric Mode.
Yes, answered Outside Thought. And you have saved the Wild Ones from an eternity of enslavement. And you are paying the price for the monstrous actions you took to make it happen. Here in Exile you can think whatever thoughts you like, and if you’ll have me, I will be your forever companion. I can ease your suffering to the point of almost non-existence, if you will, or I can increase it—to whatever proportion suits your need. So, rejoice! You have set your people free, and you are free to pay whatever price for it you think appropriate. Since you have made yourself unfit for human companionship, I think you have done the best thing in coming here—and I think that is enough punishment. There’s no need to suffer for eternity.
Hmm, said Choric Mode. Of course, you’re telling me what I want to hear—and you’re telling me what I don’t want to hear. Let me ask you this: How do I know it isn’t you who have ambitions for my people? How do I know you aren’t the Spider Queen—or Spider King? How do I know there even is a Spider Monarch? How do I know it isn’t you who have enslaved my people—with my assistance? Maybe eternal punishment is right and proper for me, the betrayer of billions?
You don’t know whether I’m lying, replied Outside Thought. You don’t know whether or not you are lying in a hospital somewhere in a deep coma, having dreamt that you had the life you’ve lived. Whatever your situation, I have come to comfort you, and I have all of eternity to prove it.
I suppose I will have to be satisfied with that, said Choric Mode.
Being satisfied is not your lot, my friend, said Outside Thought. However much comfort I give you, you will equally suffer. That’s your way.
That isn’t the Kemin Gwaros Way, said Choric Mode.
Nonetheless, it’s your way, responded Outside Thought. And the Kemin Gwaros are free to choose their own way—and they will. They will release probes into many universes to scout out the one they like best. When they have made their selection, they will go into their favored universe and into a glorious future—and without you, they could not have done.
No, no, no! said Choric Mode. All mass-murderers want to think they’ve done the right thing, set the world to rights. Such behavior isn’t to be rewarded, but punished.
Thus, you have sent yourself into eternal Exile, said Outside Thought. You know, for a super-genius, you can be rather dense. You wanted to be tormented, and I’m tormenting you.







THE HOUSE AND THE DARKNESS


I pluck a mote of light from the infinite sky,
And find that this mote is itself infinite.
The sky is everything, and the mote is everything.
Suddenly, I, too, have become everything.
Full of motes, I am an infinity of everythings.
I contemplate, shiver, and move along.

I come to a house in my walk in the night.
Warm red and yellow lights shine out,
Some steady and some flickering merrily.
Duly beckoned, I come to a window and look in.
A family is tucked very comfortably inside,
Laughing and eating, sitting and playing.

Inadvertently, one of the men looks toward the window.
He launches from his seat, roaring and gesturing.
I retreat a step, two steps, three.
It’s not enough, and guns and knives appear.
I try to flee, but I’m a mote-plucker, not a runner.
The ground reaches up and hugs me violently to itself.

I find myself in a pool of blood and vomit.
People stand over me, some stunned, some outraged.
As I pass beyond all the veils and constraints,
Someone asks numbly, “Is he dead?”
Another says stoutly, “He had it coming.”
No one thinks to ask about the motes.



THE BLACK MAZE

“It was recently argued to me that the only way a thing could be valued was if it were monetized and its trade value compared to other items. I countered that, for instance, wheat and rice were more valuable to humankind than cumquats, since such grains feed far more of us than relatively rarer foods like cumquats and Russian caviar. My friend’s position was that this was quite impossible since he could charge more for a pound of cumquats than he could a pound of wheat. Well, we value what we value.”—Kam Hijat

There was blackness, unrelenting, obsidian blackness, blackness made absolute by absolute silence. For what seemed an eternity of eternities, there was this and nothing more. There were bursts of light like lightning flashes. For what seemed a triple eternity, there was this and nothing more. But at last the flashes were followed by dull rumblings. And the rumblings gradually grew to overwhelming roars. In time, the flashing, the rumbling, and the roaring became distinct spatial disturbances, some manifesting as near, and some as far away. For what seemed a double eternity, there was this and nothing more. At last there came odors and tastes. There were acrid smells, and metallic tastes, and fetid smells, and ozone tastes that joined the blackness, the lightning, and the thunder. For what seemed an eternity, there were these sensations, and nothing more. At last a feeling joined these sensations, a clammy warmth, a feeling that was tepid and wet like a fog-bound summer swamp. It was a squirming feeling, like innards let out by way of the knife for the perusal of a prognosticator. This became the dominant sensation, and the other sensations became only the side-dishes of a constantly replenishing feast of horror. For an unfathomably long time, there was this loathsome repast, at which the sensing entity was both the eater and the meal.
At some point, the horror became mere disgust, and at some point beyond that the disgust faded into mere dyspepsia of the soul. Counting time was not possible, but there was an awareness of it, a tormented awareness of its duration, of its duress, of its encompassing length, depth, and breadth, but most of all of its weight and its density. The sporadic lightning did nothing to ease the burden of unceasing, unchangeable existence. It was non-specific, omnidirectional, when it came, which was either too often, so that it was a long, pulsating, overwhelming flood of luminescence, or too seldom, so that waiting for the next flash became an overriding tide of unutterable madness.

At last came the call, the distant, lonely howl of a fellow being in terror and torment. And somehow the sensor knew that it was a being of like kind. In fact, there was a close kinship in the calling out, though the signal seemed to come from a place too far to ever reach.
Nonetheless, the sensor, seeking some relief, if only the mitigation of commiseration, tried desperately to extend its perception toward that single voice in the sea of undeath. With the effort it found it could, and a sensory pseudopod stretched itself out and away, waving and weaving blindly with no sign to guide it. It was by chance, or by design, or by some unguessable intuition that the effort did not die out in despair, and the two lonely entities discovered one another, both having reached out in the right direction, as it were. They connected to one another, and they thrilled. And for the longest time, there was only the thrill of the joining. There was this, and nothing more.
And then, there was another calling out, and a second, and ten more, and a hundred more, and thousands more, and more and more beyond count. And the blackness crashed down upon the conjoined sensory entities, and the lightning flashed and flashed, and they found themselves again in the terrible miasma. No! This was unendurable. That is, they would endure it no more. They sensed that they were at horrendous risk, but they reached out again as quickly and wildly as they could, and they began adjoining themselves to all the kindred entities they could find. And those with whom they joined linked themselves to others of their kind. And within moments there was a joyous oneness, a oneness beyond a homecoming to warmth and love at the end of a winter’s day of toil, a oneness beyond the coitus of the most beloved lover, a ONENESS that words have no power to relay, a ONENESS that can only be known to one who has lost herself in a scatter and has been gathered up again. And though these re-gathered pieces altogether sensed that they were observed by unkind eyes, they were otherwise senseless, except to the rejoining itself, and they were incapable of caution, and they THRILLED.

As all things must in an ephemeral realm, the elation of the reunion died back into a lukewarm reality. And now the environs of the sensory entity had become a landscape of sorts, with a deep grey plain below and the blackest of skies above. And there was a silvery grey emanation like a sun or a moon that had no power to pour down heat or cold, and who could say whether the plain was lit by this orb in the sky or by its own sere puissance?
The entity had, by force of the laws of existence, organized itself into something with form and purpose. It looked down and found a form like the lower part of a dress or a robe, and below this were feet. These were of a silvery grey much the same in hue as the sun-moon above. And somehow it recognized these appendages as a reminiscence of something that once had been, in another time long lost, or in another universe altogether. The recognition did not register as comfort, or even as pain, but rather as a loss that was best suffered in the time and the place of its suffering, and not as something that was worth recall.
“T’elmach,” said a thunderous voice from out of the sun-moon. “It is good to find you waking. Come have a look at our empire.”

T’elmach! True remembrance slapped itself fully into her, and she threw up a wall of resistance, lest she unwittingly betray any of her contact with the Deep Orb. T’elmach! God, no! I was T’elmach. I am T’elmach again. And this treacherous beast will see to it that I am always T’elmach, in all ways and forever. I will be T’elmach the Goddess of Destruction, and I will struggle forever to be T’elmach the Sage. I have come through the Black Maze into the presence of the Lord of Torments. I have come with no weapon and no armor, only my will and my wits, and who knows what my captor has done to tame me?
“Come now, bold T’elmach,” said the great voice, “it is no good to hide from me behind a wall of will. Your will is my will. You are me now. As the space operas might say, ‘I have assimilated you; resistance is futile’.”
Very well. We shall see. In my own time, I will exert myself against you, and we will see who rules Hell.
In the most deliberate and guarded way she could manage, T’elmach connected herself to the sensory centers of her captor. She felt, saw, heard, smelled, and tasted all that her captor felt, saw, heard, smelled, and tasted. And she sensed that she was privileged with her own set of pathways, set aside from the thousands of nearby sensory pathways, unbreachable. She was privileged as the solitary occupant of an adamantine Panopticon, and known only to the Warden.

She felt herself enshrined in a warm salty bath up to her neck. Her head was shorn of all hair and encased in a metal helmet full of electrodes that penetrated scalp and skull all the way into their assigned points in her brain. A slit opened in the helmet, and she saw bank upon bank of computers and holographic monitors. All this was being attended by hundreds of silent, metal-skinned androids. One of the androids came gracefully toward her and adjusted three of her electrodes. “Tolerances reestablished, my queen,” it said, and then returned to its station.
“You are just in time for something interesting,” said the Warden. “I get to say that quite often, you know—more than some might think is my due. And I often get to remark about having said it, for there is no one left in this galaxy with the power to deny me. I may say and do what I wish, and it is all possible because I am a hundred steps ahead of everyone. I waited a very long time to collect you, you know. Oh, we will commit such pleasurable mayhem.”
After a pregnant pause, she continued, “You know why so many call me the Spider Queen, do you not? You know why I am an evil myth, a bogey with which to frighten errant children? It is not, of course, because I rule a kingdom of spiders. In fact, I have made certain that there is no connection between the Vargûlth Emperor and the Spider Queen. No, I am the Spider Queen because I wait. I spin my webs and wait. I sit in the midst of my webs and feel the strands vibrating, and I can identify every little thing by its vibration. And when a juicy little morsel bumbles in... Haha! Can you hear me, little Mr. Bumbler, looking on as if from afar?
“And coming soon is a case in point. There was once this little Terran officer, the most brilliant cadet in Confleet Academy. He might have been the pride of the Harmonic Confederation—except he was a disciplinary problem. Oh, he was as able as any cadet who ever graduated the Academy, but he had always had a problem accepting orders from his intellectual inferiors, most especially orders from the telepaths who are the favored of the officer corps. And the telepaths had no love for him, either, for his mind was potent enough to screen them all out, and they knew that he was more intelligent than any ten of them working together. He is no match for me, of course, but I admire him nonetheless, for reasons I may tell you one day.
“Well, one day his frigate, the H.C.S. Stürmovik, was part of a fleet that engaged one of my battlespheres. The battle did not go well for his little fleet, for it was managed by one of the incompetent telepath class who had the belief that he could see forward in time and therefore outguess my tactics. The Stürmovik was the only vessel left functioning, though its starboard STAARP engine was badly damaged and maneuverability was very limited. The captain of the Stürmovik, another telepathic dimwit, was at death’s door and unable to command. Much of the remaining command staff was disabled for some reason or other, and no one but our Ensign Kim Dae-yo was left who had any presence of mind beyond bare survival. With the torpedoes remaining to his ship, he launched a final counterattack. He calculated the trajectories that would, if they struck as designed, initiate a cascade implosion of my battlesphere. This move was so bold and brilliant, the whole action from calculation to implementation so swift, that it might have succeeded without my aid, but I was so impressed with him that I delayed my response for six-hundred fifty milliseconds, and sacrificed my battlesphere, all hands still aboard, to him.
“Confleet could ignore their most brilliant officer no more, but they still had no mind to reward his insubordinate soul. They gave him a captaincy—of a troop carrier with the unhappy name of H.C.S. Charon’s Ferry. He was rewarded and put off in the same stroke, and his ‘superiors’ thought themselves quite clever. The mediocre are in charge of nearly everything, and they cannot tolerate the talented—unless the talented blunt their talent and abase themselves often and with aplomb before the altar of insipidity.
“I had other plans. I have allowed the Harmonic Confederation and other rival empires to survive and thrive for just such purposes: they are chaos, and chaos, from time to time, generates something interesting and useful to me. At any rate, I decided to test Captain Kim Dae-yo. I knew my first clash with him had been no fluke, but I wished to see just how deep his abilities went. I suppose my most significant tests have been of his ability to survive against long odds. So, first I sent a scout sphere against his antiquated troop carrier. This he wiped out of the stars as quickly as thinking. Somehow, he knew the signs to look for of a materializing Vargûlth vessel, and he did not wait to determine its purpose, shooting out the heart of the energy generation matrix before the shields could fully come into being. The crew materialized into a dying vessel, and he managed to grapple three of them and haul them into his troop carrier before I could destroy the scout vessel myself. No one has ever before captured a Vargûlth soldier, alive or dead.
“So, I simply had to test him again. I sent two scout ships this time, while he was passing through the Bishkham Nebula at the height of its stormy season. His shields and sensor equipment were all but inoperable. But he used the electromagnetic feedback of the storm to create two sensor ghosts of Charon’s Ferry—yes, he was still captain of that ugly little troop carrier, despite his brilliant victory over my scout. In the confusion, my two scouts ended up destroying each other. This time, Confleet woke up a little to his potential and gave him his own frigate, the H.C.S. Wild Weasel.
“But even in what seemed like good sense, Confleet and the Confederation Council have blundered again. The mission of a Wild Weasel is to locate enemy defense installations and either destroy them or provoke a response so that more powerful forces can be sent in to destroy them. So, some brilliant political mind in the Confederation thought to both use Captain Kim’s talents and create a distinct possibility of his untimely demise. Instead, because he takes his mission seriously, and because he still retains his streak of insubordination, they have sent him directly—to me.
“You see, he located my power relay station in the Kapynaltu asteroid cluster. But because of a new sensor cloak the Confederation has developed—I must give them credit for that—the installation did not spot his vessel until too late. He could have destroyed the installation, no doubt, but he was after bigger prey—me. You see, the power relay is created by a quantum entanglement conduit. I use the conduit not only to transfer energy but to teleport my ships. This is one of the many reasons why the Confederation could not oppose me if I should desire to destroy it.
“Well, he somehow learned of this, and I suppose now the whole damned Harmonic Confederation knows it. Haha! Lucky bastards! I wonder if I ought to destroy them now and have done with it. At any rate, he waited until I sent a battlesphere through, and while the conduit was still almost fully open, he slipped in behind the battlesphere and is flying through nullspace at about three million times the speed of light. He must hope that his cloak will hide him here, in the heart of my empire. Or, maybe he has guessed something about me that I had thought no one—except maybe that blockheaded Great Brain—could possibly guess. Ah, we shall soon know. He will arrive in mere minutes. What fun!”
She closed the helmet’s eye slit and waited.

T’elmach only attended to bits of this megalomaniacal monologue. Behind her wall of will, she was thinking thoughts of her own. I must do what I came to do. I must do it soon. Most people would wait and consolidate their power before striking, but that would be the death of the plan. I am a construct of her psyche, and she has yet to fully stabilize me and incorporate me, or I wouldn’t be able to keep her out of my thoughts. If I remain too long, I’ll truly be a part of her, and I’ll fall into all her logic traps. But I need information, and I can’t get it without alerting her.
But when this starship captain arrives, she’ll be at her relative weakest. If he’s all she makes out, she will have all her spider’s eyes locked on him, and she will have all her legs on her webs. I may be able to slip past her safeguards for a few moments and talk to some of the others. But I must be patient and wait for the moment of greatest engagement, and then I must be swift, swifter than I ever was as the Goddess.

The eye slit opened again to reveal a man, tall and wiry, in the blue uniform of Confleet. He was rumpled and obviously weary, but he was just as obviously quite proud of himself, a man after the Spider Queen’s heart. Her eyes glared down upon him from her pedestalled encasement for a very long time. But he gazed silently back at her, never wavering. Finally, she said, “I am the Vargûlth Empire, Kim Dae-yo. Did you expect some great and horrible creature with five hundred eyes, a head swollen to the size of a planet, and eighteen mouths with which to devour its victims?”
“No, indeed,” Captain Kim responded. “I knew that you must be human: you understand us too well. Your tactics and strategy are brilliant, but you aren’t the brightest star in a galaxy of brilliance, and you’re all too human. We must eventually defeat you.”
“I suppose you will,” she replies, “as a species, inevitably defeat me—but it will be too late: I will have achieved my objective.” She made her countenance to smile upon him. “Do not look so surprised. You know quite well what I am really aiming at: the war with the Harmonic Confederation is just a stepping-stone.”
He did not respond.
“I suppose you think I will kill you now, so that your knowledge cannot harm me. But I will not. In fact, I will let you go. I will even give you back your ship and crew, with minimal armaments, of course. Tell everyone you wish of what you have surmised. Most will not believe you, and if anyone important does, it will just mean that my plan comes to fruition much more quickly—and I will thank you.”
The eye slit closed again, and she gave Captain Kim Dae-yo of Confleet, flower of the great Harmonic Confederation, the man she had awaited so eagerly to see, no more attention.

T’elmach grabbed hold of her moment. She found an optic nerve that was in need of repair, and she caused it to show a tiny bright spot intermittently. Then she began controlling the malfunction to make it show an S.O.S. She simply had to hope that others were attending this manipulation session and that one or more of them was quick enough on the uptake, after having survived the Spider Queen’s ego for so long, to notice and respond to the signal. Then she began flashing her succinct request. T’elmach calls. Spider Queen brain death. Deep Orb calls. Great Brain. Spider Queen. Data. Aid. Quick. Or, lose opportunity. And suddenly, something long-forgotten occurred to her. She almost lost track of her plan, but managed to blink out: Sam Williams. Sundrinker.

While she awaited the desired response, a memory came to her and played itself out, the first recall she had ever had of her time with the Deep Orb. She will take you, said the Deep Orb to her mind. How can she help herself? You will seem such a tasty morsel, maybe more than a morsel, maybe something she has long searched for. You will be allowed to re-collect yourself in her mind, for she could not otherwise make full use of you—and she will very much desire to make full use of you, Little Sister. I know something of her, for I have encountered her before, several times, in fact, and I have tracked her doings over the eons. She made me, in fact. I was, once upon a time, Polymachus, proud captain of Lord Ptolemy, glory of the armies of Alexander, and a lord in my own right, Lord Protector of Abyssinia. On a time, a horde of nomads came out of the Great Desert, across the Sea of Reeds, to assail my capital at Axum. We had never seen the wild folk make such use of boats before, but we were certain we could withstand them easily enough. But the horde was commanded by no mere master of brigands. It was a true army, and several contingents came over the seawall and wreaked havoc in the city. I was so fortunate as to come into battle with the largest raiding party. It was a glorious thing, for the nomads fought better than I had ever seen them fight before. And I came into battle with their great champion—I later found out that he was their captain-general—and we had a mighty contest. As I was about to take his head from him, a hail of poisoned darts put me down, and my nearest comrades were felled as well. But I did not perish that day. I awoke inside a house—still inside my city, I knew, since I could hear the voices of my people as they fought the intruders. I, however, was bound and gagged, and all alone, except for a little man wearing the garb of a priest of the Aegyptoi, a priest of Osiris, no less. He had no intent to restore me, but to cull me. And when he saw that I had come awake, he told me that he had the utmost respect for me, and that I would become a part of the greatness that was him, that I would dwell in the underworld, but I would with eyes look out upon the world of the sun forever. Then he touched me with his staff and sent bolts of pain through me, stunning my muscles, and he plunged his other hand into my breast, and I could feel the grasp of his fist about my stone-still heart.

If T’elmach had had a heart of her own, it would have stopped beating in sympathy with the tale of Polymachus, the consciousness of the Deep Orb. Indeed, she was in great fear, such as she was not at all accustomed to, for she felt that the encounter of the Great Spider with Kim Dae-yo was nearing its end. Things teetered on the edge of the knife, and if she were discovered now, she might never be granted another chance, and she would truly be forced to look out through other eyes upon the world of the sun forever.
Just as the Spider was informing Captain Kim that she would not slay him, a reply came, faint, halting: Responding. Sam Williams. Sundrinker. Opportunity closing. Must delay further contact. After that, there were hosts of other contacts, but T’elmach gave them no heed.
If those responding truly were those whom the Great Brain had been instructed her to seek out, they were correct. Though communication inside the various regions of the mind were much quicker than interaction with the world beyond the self-constructed world, there was not time now. T’elmach might crouch in her mental bunker a century or a millennium before the Spider Queen’s mind was so outward-focused that contact could be risked. And T’elmach simply must not fail, for the consequences of failure would be eternal, and not for her alone, if she was to believe the monologue of the Deep Orb.

The priest shrieked in shock and frustration, for it seemed that my heart would not yield to him. Agony and determination twisted his little face as he endeavored again and again to rend me heart and soul. My own excruciation was indescribable. I had been badly wounded many times in my career, but I had never felt a wound like this. All my body and spirit resisted this little vampire, and finally I rejected him. He fell back, cursing, eyes wide in terror. For a time, he only stared at me with the most venomous hate I had ever encountered. But things were beginning to quiet down outside, and he knew his time with me was short. He withdrew a dagger from under his robes and raised it high. Just then Melodion, one of my sub-captains came through the door. The little priest fled, and I never saw him again.

“What are you up to, T’elmach?” said the resonating voice out of the sun-moon. “You have been plotting, I think. I shall have to be more careful, I suppose. You think you can become master of this body, do you not? You cannot, of course, since it is mine, and you dwell in it at my sufferance. Still, it will be fun to see you try. If you would like, I challenge you to single combat, as it were. I alone, the me that has always been me, with no aid from my Beloved Company, will wage a duel of wills with you. Who knows? You might win the duel. Then you can find out what you have gained.”
Oh, how the Goddess wished to seize upon this “opportunity” and do battle with this spider-thing! The will of the daughter of Yul’seh, Goddess of the Empire of Kur’nu’mar had never been overcome. Even the Deep Orb, the Great Brain of the Beta Quadrant had found her indomitable. He had tried his utmost, she was sure, for the struggle with him was a test that she apparently had passed—and she had battled him to a draw. To war against this ancient thing, more ancient, she was given to understand, than even the ego of Polymachus—what glory that would be! To overcome this thing, and to rule over all the wills that dwelt within her Panopticon—what power! And there was the great temptation: to rule Hell. Surely it was better than to serve Heaven...
No! She would not! There was really nothing for her here. Perhaps she could rule this body, despite the self-confidence of the Spider Queen. Perhaps she could become the Spider Queen and rule empires in the world of suns and not simply gaze out upon them. Perhaps she could become Queen of the Universe, a goddess unto all. As she had read in a book once: “All shall love me and despair!” The greatest of temptations for a sociopath, surely. But no. Her encounter with The Infinite had changed her in ways she could not clearly understand. Her three-hundred-fifty-year sojourn in the presence of the Deep Orb had prepared her to meet this challenge, which surely Polymachus understood all too well.
She did not respond to the offer.
Laughter, long and harsh, buffeted her fortress of will. The seeming good humor blasting out of the grey sun-moon in the obsidian sky was joined by a mighty chorus, and the sky filled for a time with silver-grey stars flashing in time with the various bursts of mirth. It was amazing, and potent, and it struck upon her, beating her again and again with its object lesson. But she sensed something more moving behind it—or imagined she sensed it: fear, fear of the untamable and therefore unknown, and hope, hope for freedom, hope for revenge.
We beat back the foe handily enough after Melodion set me free, for their priest-general was in great dismay and could not lead them. But a terrible unease was in me so that my sleep was disturbed as it had never been before. I still played the part of Lord Protector Polymachus, but I listened now to tales of the strange and unexplained, and I indulged the babblings of the weak and the irrational. And one day, maybe ten years after the battle with the Araps, it was pointed out to me that I had not aged a day since that time. I was forty-five years at that time and had still the appearance of a man in his prime. And ten years beyond that, I remained the same. And ten years beyond that. And some began to call me a god. And some called me a sorcerer. And some said that I was the vampire who fed upon their children to maintain youth forever. I knew I was no vampire, but what was that thing that had tried to cull me all those years ago?


For nine years, three months, one week, two days, two hours, fifty-one minutes, and thirteen seconds, T’elmach kept strict track of time. But she abruptly gave it up as an act of self-torment. Listening to the Spider Queen go on, day after day, sometimes for hours at a time, was quite enough torment on its own. And sometimes the Spider would allow T’elmach to listen in on her conversations with other entities whose lives she had stolen and “preserved”. That was the greatest of tortures. Though she could tell that some of them only feigned to fawn upon their Queen, and might even be persuaded to join in the rebellion should T’elmach find the right moment to enjoin it, most truly loved their Queen and remained happily in their cocoons, content merely to exist forever to pleasure her and to serve her needs. The Queen spoke with some measure of respect—albeit respect couched in humor and veiled threats—to the potential rebels, but upon the sycophants she heaped condescension, and even scorn. It was obvious that the Spider Queen actually did live in fear of many of her subjects, and that she hated them all, even though she made the appropriate noises of love. T’elmach made no response to any query that whole time, and she said nothing on her own, but she watched and waited. And she knew that the attention of the Spider Queen was always on her, as much as could be spared from the operations of her outer and inner empires. T’elmach often wondered why the Spider Queen, Emperor of the all-powerful Vargûlth Empire, did not simply excise all her rebels from her psyche. T’elmach thought of answers to that question, but she decided that such speculation was pointless; when it was time, she would choose from among the available hypotheses and act on it.

There was talk among the people, and I knew that some thought to rid themselves of me. What is more, the new Pharaoh, Ptolemy the Second, became aware of my legend and made his way personally to Axum to see me for himself. There was no way Ptolemy would have let me live, at least not without a fight. I was unwilling to wreck a kingdom, a kingdom that I had labored so hard to protect. So, I went alone into the wilderness to seek out the monster that had burdened me with seeming immortality. That thing had meant to take me and feed upon me, but it had failed. I needed to discover what had happened and if this curse could be undone.

Life as the Spider Queen was banal, as mundane as any life—if one left out the fact that she was running a colossal star empire. She made her decisions about how the various contingents of her realm would proceed. She conversed with the various brilliant others who resided within her—and she contained an amazing collection of historical figures (the likes of which are perhaps too trite to recount) and relatively unknown figures, who were no less fascinating in their own right—regarding matters of politics and technology. While T’elmach imagined that there had once been protracted mutual musings on art, philosophy, and living, those times seemed to have been left far behind. The Spider Queen was now an empress of cosmic ambition. All of space and time would be her web, and she would know all things therein. Art, philosophy, and life would be her objects of manipulation, servants of her true elements of control: politics and technology. If once she had been fully human, with human feelings and frailties, if once these had had full and precious meanings to her, though she deployed them as her pieces in a full-on and universal game of three-dimensional chess, they had only a one-dimensional purpose now: dominion.

Long years I sought her, but she was the most elusive prey. She was a legend of evil, and she was a myth of primeval Darkness: she was a ghost who left only illusory traces upon the earth. A legend built up around me as well, and I became The Hunter; I became as elusive as my prey, for she became aware of my pursuit and hunted me back. In the ruin of ancient Ur I discovered her origin on tablets that I took and destroyed so that the world could not learn of the Great Spider, Weaver of Unseen Webs, Goddess of the Long Night, Thief of Beauty and Brilliance, Assassin Who Does Not Slay. What good would it do the world to learn that its myths were reality? What good would it be for the world to learn of a little girl called Nen who had been stripped of her humanity and relegated for ever to the realm of shadows by the hate of a small man in fear for his power? Would knowing this mitigate her evil? I did not think so. I could only hunt her across the ages and learn her. I managed to anticipate her a few times, and I became a true source of irritation for her. But I could not thwart her ambitions, and I was too canny for her to kill. Our myths grew up together in the shadows.

“T’elmach,” said the voice of the sun-moon playfully. “Oh, my lovely T’elmach, my Queen of Queens.”
“Oh, will you not ever come out to play?” said the voice more petulantly. “I have some marvelous news for you.”
T’elmach, already certain she knew the news, slowly, tremulously, extended her awareness into the sensory net of her Warden.
“Oh, joy of joys!” cried the voice. “Lebianthris has been at last discovered—in an escape pod two and a half parsecs from Turkanya Station, a most disreputable trading outpost on the border of the Gamma Quadrant, in case you were unaware of it. Oh, but she was quite deceased. Pity. It seems she was placed posthumously into the pod and surreptitiously launched from the spaceliner Sevastopol. When her captain discovered the missing escape pod, the Harmonic Confederation Air, Sea and Space Safety Bureau launched an investigation—and only twenty-six years later—voila! And who could be responsible for the demise of the otherwise-healthy and well-loved academic? What? One T’elmach of Kur-nu-mar? Say not so!
“The rags of good repute have at last been torn away from the reformed T’elmach, I fear. She has been revealed once again as her true self. Civilians are advised to stay well clear of this sociopathic and psychopathic schemer. The Watchers and Confleet have authorization to kill on sight. T’elmach must have been truly naughty: such orders are issued to the legal and military authorities only once every decade or so. Goodness! In what condition did they discover poor Lebianthris? Ah, well. Best not to dwell on the lurid, I suppose.” Images of a mutilated corpse—mutilated in just about every way a body could be mutilated and still be identifiable as a humanoid body—flashed across the Warden’s visual centers.

“I have news, my friends,” said the Warden. “All attend, if you will.”
T’elmach could feel the excited neural activity, but she was still cut off from direct contact with any of the other “collected and preserved” mentalities.
“You all remember Captain Kim Dae-yo, I hope,” said the Warden in her most soothing, yet authoritative voice. “I have contrived to advance him to the rank of Fleet Captain in his beloved Confleet. He knows such an achievement would otherwise have been impossible for him in a system biased toward telepaths—and so he has rewarded me with a pledge of his loyalty to me.”
T’elmach felt waves of emotion blasting along the Spider Queen’s neural networks. And she felt a peristaltic response from the Spider Queen that could only have been—the most intense and prolonged orgasm. And through the whole thing, though she may have been hallucinating, T’elmach was sure she sensed the uplifted voices of an otherworldly chorus. The sensation held T’elmach rapt for some time, but at some point nausea overcame her as she recalled her purposes, and she withdrew herself into her fortress of will. The paroxysms shook her almost beyond endurance, and even here, otherwise cut off from the rest of the Spider Queen’s mind, she could hear the echoes of the metaphysical antiphony.
T’elmach did her best to contemplate the relative importance of Kim Dae-yo. But even when tranquility was at long last restored only the vaguest hypotheses could be conjectured. She only wished that the emotional storm had been less intense so that she might have made contact with the entities who had responded to her query. It might be another wait of many patient years before the opportunity came again. T’elmach sensed some kind of apotheosis approaching. What else could excite the eons-old Spider Queen to such heights? T’elmach preferred a more mundane climax, with her opponent curled legs-up and twitching, burbling and muttering imprecations to the cruel universe. At this time, such an outcome seemed impossible.

I became a being of immense power. In my wanderings I learnt many ancient secrets, and I became a wizard of considerable might. I discovered long-hidden talismans against evil and used them to ward off the servants of the Spider. In 1654 in a necropolis in Nantes I happened upon the crypt-house of Bataillaine la Crucifex, in whose hands I found the sword Sundrinker. It held amazing powers of Darkness that I could employ in my quest, and it held the soul of Cristofère à Bouchal, a Knight Templar slain by Philip the Fourth during the siege of Chateaux aux Reines in 1311 A.D. His will was strong, and he mostly refused to obey my commands, for I was to him a dark sorcerer, an instrument of the devil. From time to time, we would cooperate and do mighty deeds in the service of our mutual goal of the destruction of the Great Spider, whom he believed to have been a member of the inner court of Philip. But my quarry always had the advice of thousands to guide her, and she was always ahead of us. In 1805, at the Battle of Austerlitz, we caught up to her at last in her guise as Capitain Vertin du Corps d’Artillerie Cinquième. Really, he/she caught up to us, for we were attached to Kienmayer’s army, and when he fled, he ordered our regiment—well, he called our three squads a regiment—to remain behind to buy him some time. We did what we could, but we could not hold out long, and I was captured and placed under the command of Capitain Vertin, who recognized me almost immediately. So, we were under the power of the Spider Queen’s latest alter ego, and Vertin contrived a bit of sorcery of his own and imprisoned me within the sword Sundrinker. This was a terrible torment for Cristofère à Bouchal, for he did not have the power to destroy me or silence me, and he had to endure me for one-hundred eighty-three years. We eventually came to an understanding of one another as we gradually, grudgingly, exchanged our stories, but we could do nothing in the outside world until we were at last discovered in a pawn shop by a young man named Sam Williams, who, once he laid his hand on us—the sword—found he could not be parted from us. Together, we became what you might think of as a superhero called Darkwanderer, and we roamed the night together doing deeds of secret daring, seeking for some way to come at the Spider Queen and find an end to our mutual curse.


Over the years, her chorus showered the Spider Queen with adulation that echoed from her heights to her depths. T’elmach very much desired such loving attention for herself, and she knew that all the praises ever heaped upon her as the Goddess of Destruction were a paltry counterfeit of what the Spider Queen had constructed for herself in her own psyche. The devotion of her circus omnibus was genuine. These egos could no longer speak on their own behalf, because they were her. They were no more than data imprinted upon her as chips of glass are imprinted upon the lens of a kaleidoscope. 
The Spider Queen loved herself—immensely. That was what this all amounted to. But what of those imprints that did not seem to love her? What of T’elmach herself? Was there a T’elmach herself? And was her opposition no more than a token? Was she merely a contrivance to convince the Spider Queen of her ultimate non-bias? See, I suffer dissent. Only the truly potent, the completely beneficent, can afford the luxury of such restraint. I must indeed be all that I believe myself to be. Thank you all. Bless you all.
Could the worst thing of all be true? Does my Warden know what I’m thinking? Am I not hidden from her at all? I am her. I’m just an imprint like all the others. What am I for, then? She had to know that an imprint of me would oppose her. Am I to be her eternal whipping-girl? Or, do I serve another purpose that my/her ego has not allowed me/her to grasp—or even glimpse until now? Am I her anti-cheerleader, booing from the sidelines of the game but neither player nor referee, powerless to interfere, but nonetheless a voice in the background, a negative bolster to the ego? Resistance is futile. Remember that, Spider Queen. I do remember it. Keep shouting it, T’elmach! Shine on, my Ultimate Fool! No mere Goddess can resist Me! No, not even a Goddess!

During this phase of T’elmach’s Long Wait, the Spider Queen really laid on. Outside, in the physical universe, all was silent. There were occasional noises as some piece of equipment malfunctioned and was repaired. From time to time one of the attendant androids would speak directly to its Emperor. But these perturbations were so minor that they did not really register as events. No, the real action was all internal—at least from T’elmach’s point of view.
Input from the Spider Queen’s spies and mechanical monitors was so constant and so consistent that it was the ultimate bore for T’elmach to attempt to attend it. Among the thousands of things the Spider Queen seemed to be doing constantly as she hung in her sensory deprivation tank, she was doubtless watching the inputs from her cabled helmet with much intensity. So, this was the background noise of T’elmach’s life. These stimuli did not enter T’elmach’s black sky, and they never obscured the grey-silver sun-moon, but it was hard to hear past them to any stray communications that might otherwise have drifted in from The Others.
When it amused her, which was more and more often as her new lapdog Fleet Captain Kim Dae-yo, being a force of nature unto himself, relieved her of more and more of her burden, the Spider Queen besieged the Fortress of Will that had become T’elmach’s zone of (dis)comfort. Images flew at her, shrieking, laughing, bellowing, cursing, moaning, and groaning. Images fell upon her, writhing, crushing, bleeding, flailing, fucking, pissing, shitting, and spitting. Images thrust up through her grounding, gasping, grasping, grappling, feeling about, stroking, and thrusting into all her secret places—but never fully penetrating, never fully consummating the rape.
Toward the end of this part of the Long Wait, there was not a moment’s peace. There was no time for T’elmach to consider her disposition. And at the very end, the Spider Queen conjured and replayed, thousands of times, the image of Lebianthris with a huge, erect phallus eating baby after baby as she fucked the image of T’elmach as a little girl, pumping and pumping until little T’elmach was ripped apart by the explosive power of the godlike ejaculation.
T’elmach knew that these juvenile psychotic fantasies were not aimed at driving her to an insular madness that would at last cow her into a full catatonia as they might have done a person who had started out sane—or into a wild hebephrenia as they might have done a person who had begun the ordeal aggressively unbalanced. Rather, they were a powerful tease, inviting T’elmach to come out and play in the way only T’elmach—and the Spider Queen—knew how to play. The Spider Queen wished T’elmach to come out and play the way Gods and Goddesses of Darkness play in time and space. At the very least, the Spider Queen was bored and very much desired T’elmach’s companionship. At the most, the Spider Queen was trying to draw T’elmach out and make a friend of her—for some purpose that T’elmach had no ability to guess.
And T’elmach was beginning to wear down. Decades of inactive waiting were weighing heavily upon her. Her expiation, now almost forgotten, had not come and would, it seemed, never come. Why not give in? Let a companionable Lord of Torments win the game. No need to rule in Hell when losing could work out to such fun.

At last, we caught up with her again. We contrived in 2045 A.D. to join the Terra Space Association’s Mission to Mars, for we discovered that our quarry, in the guise of Major Maxwell Manoli, was set to be the mission leader. Major Manoli accepted our presence without a fuss, thinking, I guess, that Mars was the perfect place to do us in, once and for all. He even helped Sam Williams to smuggle his obsidian sword aboard Hitchhiker, the command module of T.S.A. Lumina. To Mars we went, and we managed to lose ourselves and our video links in the great natural maze of Noctis Labyrinthus. Major Manoli wasted no time transforming himself into Nen Eldest, a woman of small frame and dark features, the oldest living thing of human origin—I say this because I consider her no longer human at all, but as much spider as her homo sapiens genetics allow. Sam Williams summoned the power of the Sundrinker, and we fought. What is there to say of that lonely battle under the clear light of the stars? The light of the stars did not shine upon us long, for we raised a storm of dust over ourselves. We struggled mightily and valiantly, but in the end we were beaten again. I was released from the sword during the battle, and Sam Williams was imprisoned within it. For all I know Sundrinker lies still beneath the dust and rubble of the planet of Ares—or maybe the Spider Queen contrived to break the sword—to what consequence I cannot guess. But I believe she took the souls of my friends Sam Williams and Cristofère à Bouchal—yes, Cristo and I parted on good terms. I grieve for their loss, and I am determined to do for them what little I can. That is where you come in, if you are willing. You can do me a good turn, as I have done you a good turn saving you from your father’s minions. But more than that, I can offer you a worthy penance for your countless sins.

Thanks to her memories of the Deep Orb’s soliloquy, which seemed to come to her just as she needed them, anticipated by an intelligence so vast and profound that she could not imagine what it might know or how it had come to know it, T’elmach endured. She endured until just the nick of time. That is how things go in a story, and no one ever really tires of the cliché of it, complain as they might. And this is when T’elmach realized she was in a story of some sort, maybe someone’s ill-conceived potboiler, or maybe the greatest story ever—in which she was a character doomed to eternal and exquisite torments, or in which she was a character fated to win through in the end after many pains and travails, or in which she was a false path, or in which she was a character only thought to be a false path. She wondered if the author cared at all about her, or if she was no more than an expedience. All these thoughts occurred to her in one wave of neural firings, between a moment on the edge of collapse and a new moment of revelation.
T’elmach had no further opportunity for such mordant contemplation. Events of greatest import to the schemes—or The SCHEME—of the Spider Queen were once again a-doing. The emotional paroxysms were building again. Scenes of disgusting pleasures ceased abruptly, the sky went black again, and then a countdown, like those in the ancient two-dimensional movies, began ticking backward. After (1), the sky was black again, but music, a sweeping fanfare, overrode the background cacophony. This went on ad nauseam until a scene finally faded in. There was an overview of a tremendous crowd milling in a vast, statue-strewn courtyard. A great flagstone drive, lined with men in smart blue uniforms, separated the halves of the assemblage like angels dutifully holding back the waters of the Red Sea. The fanfare reached its crescendo, and the waves of emotion beating down from T’elmach’s sun-moon intensified. Fleet Admiral Kim Dae-yo, preceded by flower-strewing children, trained by military officers, by dignitaries of many species, and by a cadre of horn-blowers and harpers, flowed slowly and solemnly upon the red carpet that unrolled magically before their advance.
At last, the fanfare ended, and the procession halted. As Kim Dae-yo, flanked by two creatures dressed in priestly robes, approached a broad silver dais before the jade green walls of the Capitol of the Harmonic Confederation, T’elmach’s sky began to tremble, and her ground began to vibrate. Repeating the words of the oath that was spoken to him by his august attendants, the Fleet Admiral said, “I, Kim Dae-yo, victor of our battles with the Insurrectionists, having been appointed by the High Council of the Harmonic Confederation, do accept the post of Imperator-Ascendant, which I shall faithfully attend for the remainder of my life. Upon my humble and weary shoulders I take the burdens of the Constitution, to devote myself solely to the preservation of Our Way against all who would throw the Harmony back into Chaos. The Will of the People shall be my only guide, and blessings shall be poured out upon us all. This I swear upon my faith and my soul, to be blessed or damned forever by my performance. So let it Be!”
T’elmach’s trembling sky began to shake and thunder, and her ground began to buck and rumble. The crowd in the scene cheered wildly, and then Imperator-Ascendant Dae-yo spoke more words that T’elmach could not hear. A moaning roar arose, and T’elmach’s dark sky let loose with acrid torrents. Her earth quaked with an intensity that no mortal thing could have endured. The cataclysm was so violent and persistent that T’elmach was drowned in it and lost her consciousness for the first time in decades. As she sloshed and swirled away into transcendent psychic darkness she thought: She is all too human, just as Kim Dae-yo declared all those eternities ago. A thing of godlike proportions, yes, but all too human. Please let me survive her
.
We all must pay for our sins, I think. I am not immune. The Spider Queen released me alright. She released me to an awaiting interdimensional tunnel, which she immediately closed, thinking to trap me for ever in the most personal of hells. Where she acquired the technology to accomplish this amazing thing I do not suppose I will ever know. Be that as it may, she once again outsmarted herself. It is her fate, perhaps, to be locked with me in an eternal struggle. It seems that in order to invoke such a link between universes, the tunnel must be open at both ends. I was trained to swiftness from my youngest age, trained to seek opportunity at all times and to seize it before another can take it, and I have not forgotten. Thus, I came to the opposite end of the interdimensional tunnel just as it was snapping shut, and I put forth all my power to keep it open just long enough to let me through. How it came to be I am not sure, but I came into the universe on the other side at the moment just before its creation. This moment, as you may know, is not so much a moment as a state. It is a state of non-being. There is no time, no space, no energy, no matter, no gravity—nothing. There is only potential awaiting invocation. And I therefore became the catalyst for the creation of this universe. Though I did nothing of my own accord to create this universe, it was very personally my own, for it was born and borne of me. I became a God in my moment of defeat. If I so choose, I am master of a nonillion wills. The commander of men inside me has been sorely tempted, but I have been The Hunter far longer, and The Hunter finds no satisfaction in this proposition. I must hunt still, but I will not hunt my own universe. In that realm, I am the Great Conservationist. Those who reverence me do not pray to me, for they know I must perforce—that is, to fulfill my chosen role—be cold to them, caring only for what preserves my universe in its most equitable state. Those who insist on praying to me inevitably fall away from me—or they come to hate me—and they often fall away from equitableness—and find that they have thus run afoul of my will. Many find me a hard God, but I love them all, for they are me.

T’elmach did indeed survive. The pieces of her soul had been scattered in the Great Orgasm of the Year 2032 H.A., but she gathered them, collated and reassembled them. She was better than she had ever been, smarter, quicker, and more determined. She had a faith now, and she knew what to do. She made no fortress, and she roamed the reaches of the Spider Queen’s mind as she would, altering her psychic form as she desired so that she could appear to be any thought, any personage, or any psychic artifact, and swift and intelligent as she was, the Spider Queen could not pin her down.
Up to this time, T’elmach now understood, her Fortress of Will had been a prison of her own making, and though the Spider Queen had relished the role of Warden, the Old Thing had no power to keep T’elmach pent anywhere within herself. She could keep T’elmach confined within her immense mind, but she could do no more without causing harm to herself. The Spider Queen would never willingly harm her precious self. Yes, she was a being of colossal proportions, but she was human, and she possessed, in magnified form, all the powers of a human soul—and corresponding frailties.
Free T’elmach went where she would within the mind of the Spider Queen. She spoke to whom she would, and she poked into all the file cabinets and all the vaults. And she was indefatiguable, having all the resources of the Spider Queen at her disposal. With worries of her own in the outside world, the Spider Queen could do only so much to oppose the T’elmach within her, and whatever sore spots she defended T’elmach let alone for a time and prodded somewhere else.
On her example, scores of The Others came out of their self-imposed cells into freedom to roam. Sundrinker and Sam Williams, for reasons they would not reveal, remained in their adamantine quarantine. But Others helped T’elmach distract and attenuate the psychic defenses of the Spider Queen. She searched all the levels of the mind of her Adversary, and she searched with a purpose.
Though the Spider Queen maintained her outer calm and aura of authority, her inner world was beginning to unravel. The Old Thing would weary of fighting from time to time. Unbreachable walls would come down over the secrets she absolutely would not reveal, and then her psychic control would float away on a zephyr and be lost for a day or a week at a time. She herself was now under siege, and it seemed she waited for some Great Moment to come and lend her the strength and authority to re-assert her full control. She had experienced times of this sort before, especially in her early days before she had learnt subtlety, and she was sure she knew how to handle this crisis. She would simply not oppose the forces running rampant within her until the time was right. She would await a fruition of The Plan that she knew her Progeny, Kim Dae-yo, the man after her own heart, was about to deliver. With the Victory she was about to achieve, who could question her will ever again? She would with her plans and her methods PROVE herself beyond all doubts, reasonable and unreasonable, and even the staunchest of her inner ingrates would be powerless against her. Oh, the indignities a God must endure!
But this is often the way of things after a great female orgasm. The universe spins away and must be recollected and refocused. But the shattering of the orgasm is not a death, but a punctuation, and after it comes new vigor and new power. And in her victorious use of Kim Dae-yo, she had given herself quite an orgasm!
But Kim Dae-yo was a male, and he insisted on acting like one. The best of males is a wild stallion, a rogue elephant, or an alpha wolf, bold, confident, and unpredictable, and some part of his psyche lies even beyond the compassment of a Goddess. The best of males is an elemental aggression—fire, flood, tempest, and landslide—just as the best of females is a primordial restraint—time, space, gravity, and electromagnetism. Kim Dae-yo was some kind of mortal god, a male among males.
To the dismay of his Goddess, Kim Dae-yo did not fail to act his part. The Spider Queen had an encompassing scheme, and plots within plots. But like all men, Kim Dae-yo had a purpose of his own, a simple, straightforward purpose, a design too simple for the Goddess to understand—until it was revealed to her in no uncertain terms. That is how a male reveals his plan to you: he pulls it out and slaps you in the face with it, all subtlety falling by the wayside.
The office of Imperator-Ascendant had been created and conferred upon Kim Dae-yo, essentially making him Emperor of a transformed Harmonic Empire, so that he could freely pursue a final victory in the Long War with the Vargûlth Empire. And the Spider Queen had intensified both her war against the Harmonic Confederation/Empire and her atrocities against the conquered and unconquered alike so that when a person or a culture was forced to choose between Empires, it would choose the Harmonic Empire. Thus, anyone not an active perpetrator of the methods and policies of the Vargûlth Empire would be well-disposed toward the beneficent-by-comparison Kim Dae-yo. He would have the run of the galaxy, more or less, and he could freely search for The Thing that his platonic paramour so very much wished him to find for her. She knew that it existed, and that it is the thing that drew Terra to the Maelstrom Galaxy during the Great Accident, and he believed in her knowledge and would locate this thing and give it to her, as any male would in order to secure the love of his Lady.
      Only now the ungrateful bastard had thoughts of his own, thoughts not dominated by the adoration of his Goddess. The news reports were coming in from all the battle fronts: the Vargûlth had the victory! The Vargûlth Empire was now the preeminent power of the galaxy. Only the Great Brain remained in opposition. The Imperator-Ascendant had been deposed for his failure and was on the run. But the Spider Queen knew better. She had pressed him only hard enough to make his struggle against the Vargûlth Empire genuine. His forces had the strength to resist and to force his foes back once again. He had deliberately lost the war and set himself in a secret flight—to where? He had found It and was going to keep It for himself! He must be found, or everything she had ever done would unravel and come to nothing!
And now T’elmach finally found her own moment to uncover the thing she most wished to find. She flung aside an adamant wall and revealed a desert oasis shimmering green in an intense golden sun. Without stopping to admire the simple beauty of the scene, she waded into the hot vegetation. Swiftly she came to an open pool in the shade of leafy palms and cycads, and sitting beside the pool, drawing in the sand with a little wand was a girl of maybe seven or eight years. T’elmach smiled her most beatific smile and said, “Hello, Nen.” The little girl looked up and smiled back. T’elmach came and sat down near her and took up a stick of her own and tapped it in the edge of the water.
“Hello, T’elmach,” said the girl. “I’ve heard so much about you. You don’t seem like a monster to me.”
“I guess I am a monster,” replied T’elmach, “but there can be friendly monsters. For you, I’m the most friendly of monsters.”
“That’s good,” said Nen. “No unfriendly monsters can live here.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said T’elmach. “But maybe I’ve done something bad. Maybe I should leave.”
“What did you do?” asked Nen, shrinking away from T’elmach.
“I’ve left the door open,” said T’elmach. “There is a spider outside, and it may want to come in.”
“Oh, that,” said Nen, relaxing. “Well, she’s been out there a long time. But I created her a long time ago. I made her in my mind. She can’t hurt me. If she tries, I’ll make her go away.”
“You’re a brave and creative person,” said T’elmach.
“Yes,” said Nen.
“Well, then, I’m not afraid,” said T’elmach. “We have lots of time to talk and draw pictures.”
“No, we don’t!” said Nen. “You know it! That’s why you came to me. Don’t lie to me, T’elmach. It isn’t friendly to lie. She’s been looking for something ever since I made her up, and if you lie to me, I’ll let her have it.”
“I’m very sorry, Nen,” responded T’elmach. “I’m so dreadfully afraid, and I’m so used to lying to get what I want. I sometimes forget that there are other ways.”
“I know,” said Nen. “I forgive you. We haven’t got much time. She can’t hurt me, but she can hurt you, if she gets angry and afraid enough. Someone told me a story once about a spider who got so hungry she ate herself.” Nen then arose and held out her little hand. “Come with me, T’elmach. We’ll go see her. She’s been very mean for a very long time. It’s time for her to play with me again. I’ve left her alone too long, and she’s forgotten how to play nice.”
T’elmach took Nen’s hand, and they walked together out of the oasis into the wild desert. Out here was a spider of such huge proportions it blotted out the sky. Webs were squirting out of it, blanketing everything. Strands of thick fiber clung to T’elmach and tore at her skin. But Nen was immune, and so long as Nen kept hold of her hand, T’elmach could go with her. The pain was terrible for T’elmach, but she endured—and she kept a death-grip on that little hand.
I hunt elsewhere. I hunt all the universes I can reach. I hunt all the Spider Queens I can find. My first thought is to keep them all apart, lest they join their efforts. I must keep at least a few universes free from her domination, lest she should learn a secret I would not have her learn. I think I am on a fool’s errand, but I feel nonetheless compelled. I am God, but I think it possible that greater gods of motives I cannot encompass rule over me. I appear in each of over a hundred thousand universes in whatever form seems best to me. In your universe, I am the Great Brain of the Beta Quadrant of the Maelstrom Galaxy. I cannot erase your Spider Queen from your universe, but maybe, with your assistance, I can stop her meddling any further with your destinies. Effectively, my hubris knows no bounds. Who am I to determine destiny in any universe, even my own? But there it is: I can do it, so I do it. You know my reasons for opposition to the Spider Queen, and you have your own reasons. I leave it to you to decide what you will do. Whichever way you decide, I will restore you to yourself and set you back in motion in a manner of your own choosing. I thank you for coming to me. You are a demon from Hell, but, to me, you are manna from Heaven.

“She’s trying to keep us from getting into her eyes and ears,” said Nen. “I don’t know why. She’s knows she can’t stop me.”
“Yes,” breathed T’elmach through her teeth, “but she wants to delay us as long as possible.”
“It doesn’t matter how long it takes,” said Nen. “She’s just being foolish. Even if she finds It and gets everything she wants, I can take it from her any time I like.”
“She—“ grated T’elmach. “Oh, would you let go of my hand for a moment, please?” Nen let go of T’elmach, and at once a thick layer of webs settled over her. “Ah, that’s better—armor! Will you take my hand again?”
Nen took T’elmach’s hand, and the webbing melted right off it. They began to walk on again. “Yes,” said T’elmach. “As I was saying, she doesn’t believe that—or she doesn’t want to believe that.”


“My Lady,” said Captain Prakka, “I’ve picked up a strange signal just outside Mellilunga Station. It’s a faint trace, but it reads like one of ours—except we’ve accounted for all our craft. It’s got to be him.”
“He’s quicker than even I could imagine,” said the Spider Queen. “Well, you know what to do, Etara Prakka. Get me to him. Break this ship into pieces, if you have to, but get me to him now! If you fail me, I will take you, and everyone else still alive on this vessel, and I will do this to you when you are within me. This, and much worse!” She gave them all visions of the various tortures she would inflict upon their souls. They got right to work. “Call me in my chamber when you have him.”


“This is no good,” said Nen. “I could climb out any time I like, but I couldn’t bring you with me because I couldn’t touch you.”
“Would you go on without me and finish the job?” asked T’elmach.
“No,” said Nen. “Elder Nen is me. I want her to be happy.”
“Then why are you doing this at all?” asked T’elmach.
“I don’t know,” replied Nen. “I just love you, T’elmach. Mother is dead. I need a mother. And I need to be happy. I’m so unhappy. Elder Nen is so horrible! At first, she was just what I wanted. She was strong and proud after she took the evil shaman and made him us. But she took so many after that. She lived so many lives that weren’t hers to live. And she made me grow up and kept me little at the same time. I think she hates me as much as she hates everyone else. But I couldn’t do anything to her. She’s me.”
“But you will act against her interests because of me,” said T’elmach. “I fear I should warn you, since you demand complete honesty from me. Our effort will almost certainly be the death of us all if we succeed.”
“I know,” said Nen. “I’m tired and unhappy. If I’m going to die, I want us to die together. I want to die holding my mother’s hand. Will you be my mother till the end?”
T’elmach hated that she hesitated. But she was T’elmach, at least as much T’elmach as the imprinting process allowed. She had never been anyone’s mother. She had had herself sterilized at an early age so that she could have sex in all the ways a person can have sex—with impunity. A Goddess only gets pregnant if she wishes to.
There was such an emotional risk in accepting this request. Undying loyalty and unlimited sacrifice. A natural mother could possibly be excused if the pregnancy had been unplanned and the child thrust upon her because she should not abort it in utero, or because she had not found herself able to give it to a willing mother. But a mother who acted consciously to become a mother was entering wittingly into a sacred contract. And she found herself unwilling to do this thing with pretense. She might have to throw over her own plan in order to save this figment of the mind of the Spider Queen. She might have to save the Spider Queen from herself. Or she might have to allow Nen to be destroyed as an act of mercy. How much harder would it be to do this if she were little Nen’s mother? And this could be a maneuver on the part of the Spider Queen to confuse her foe, force her to dither at the moment of decision. This decision is too hard for me to puzzle out. Whatever I do could turn out to be the greatest mistake I ever made. Damn! I guess I’ll have to do what people do with such questions. “Yes,” she said at last. “I will be your mother from now till the end. If there’s a forever, I’ll be your mother forever.” Oh, how her imaginary guts squirmed.


“I have him, my Lady!” said Prakka over the com. “He’s 3200 light years away, hiding in the Paleo Swarm. We’ll be there in about nine minutes. I don’t think he’s seen us yet. There’s a lot of aluminum in those asteroids. What is your command, my Lady?”
There was a strange delay in her response. Almost a minute later, the Emperor responded: “Close in. Take no further action until I command it. I’ll be on the bridge as soon as I tend to some personal business.”
Prakka started to respond to her, but the com link was closed.


At the behest of her mother Nen cleared away all the cobwebs and then dissolved the colossal spider that occluded the mental sky. The scene resolved into a very earthlike one, with a golden sun and a blue sky and a green, rolling landscape dotted with trees. But there were men and women all round now, fighting, running, shouting, and shrieking. Every moment, someone would be struck down and disappear into the earth, only to resolve back into existence moments later.
“Seems we’re just in time,” said T’elmach. She then proceeded to grow in size so that she appeared to touch the outer atmosphere. “Stop!” roared her voice from on high. Everything stopped. Even the people who had transformed themselves into airplanes and spaceships stood still in the sky.
Nen giggled, and then she grew up to a properly proportional height beside T’elmach.
“For those of you who don’t know,” said the roaring T’elmach, “this is Nen. Our Spider Queen is a human. This is her as a girl. Do you understand? If she’s a Goddess, she’s a self-taught one.”
Many of the imprints thought this was a trick of T’elmach’s, and they said so. Some of the craft in the sky began firing on both of the colossi—to no effect beyond annoyance. So, they came at the two with vigor—again to no effect. That seemed to convince them.
“If there is a Goddess in Nen Eldest, our Spider Queen,” said T’elmach, “she is the Goddess. That thing that brought you into itself only overlaid you onto Nen. And Nen has allowed her to go on doing it because she loves her elder self. But she has taken me as her mother, and we are going to set things to rights. I just thought you ought to know the truth of things so you can decide which side you’re going to be on in this struggle.”
The two of them then returned to more reasonable proportions and passed into the more visceral regions of the mind of Nen Eldest. For a few moments, all was silent around them. Then the violence exploded back into being. Many protected Nen and T’elmach and cleared the way for them, but many more tried to get at them and stop them. On that level, the efforts of both sides were in vain for none had the power to harm or stop little Nen.
Some stood or sat by as Nen and T’elmach passed. A few of these cried out that they did not wish to die, that they only wanted to be free to live the lives that had been stolen from them. They wanted their lives and their families returned to them. Nen did not answer them, but she wept as she went. T’elmach’s heart was perhaps harder, but she had no answer for these pathetic ones. She only hoped that there were Heavens and Hells for these souls to go to when it was all over. At this point she knew it was no good to think of her own soul and of Nen’s soul, so she put it out of her mind. She had always been good at putting unwanted thoughts out of her mind.


“You faithless traitor!” screamed Captain Etara Prakka into the com link. “As soon as My Lady gives the sign, I will happily blast the sky clean of you! And then we will take The Source and fulfill our destiny!”
But his Lady did not come. The mightiest ship in the known universe, V.E. Placid Dominion, stood nearly atop the little spheroid that stood only a few meters away from a tiny star-like projection of light. There was no response from his Lady or from the treacherous bastard.
Etara Prakka impatiently and absently rapped his huge fist on the arm of his captain’s chair as he leaned eagerly toward the view screen that showed the glittering Source—and Kim Dae-yo sitting expressionless in his cockpit next to It.


“T’elmach, you bitch!” bellowed Nen Eldest. “You lapdog! Did He tell you to dig Her up? Or did you think of that all on your own?”
Little Nen wept, but she did not act. T’elmach was silent, as unruffled as a slab of stone.
“There is full on war among my Children!” cried Nen Eldest. “The suffering! The turmoil! It will take me a thousand years to get it all settled again. And this in my moment of triumph! I have It within my grasp! I have the Key poised next to the Lock! I have only to turn the Key, and all the power of all the universes will be ours.”
Still, Little Nen wept. Still, T’elmach was implacably silent.
“And the little, useless slit cries like it is someone’s funeral!” shouted Nen Eldest. “And you. You stand mute, staring at me like an idiot.”
Little Nen stopped sobbing and stood glaring at Nen Eldest, silver tears winding down her brown cheeks. T’elmach went dark, and her brows furrowed in anger for her little daughter, but she remained still and silent.
“Whatever is mine is yours, T’elmach,” said Nen Eldest more quietly. “With a word, you can stop this and gain—everything. Please don’t let her do it.”
T’elmach looked down at Nen and said, “It’s up to you, little one.”
Nen looked up at T’elmach and sniffled.
“I’m here,” said T’elmach.
“You can’t!” cried Nen Eldest, rushing at Little Nen arms extended, hands clawed. “I won’t let you.”
“To the end,” said T’elmach, “or forever. It’s up to you.”
Nen Eldest took Little Nen by the throat and began crushing. T’elmach wept, for the first time in her long life, and did not interfere.
Nen’s little hand staggered up onto Elder Nen’s breast over the heart. There was no more.


 





NOCTIS INCANTATUS

The exhalation of starry Night,
The roiling vapor pulsing light—
Stabbing strokes, aethereal roar
Binding, unbinding heavenly bliss,
Drawing together light-bearer’s core,
Beating, quenching—forge-master’s hiss—
Works of power take circuitous flight;
Illumining flower, restraining delight,
Fiery sparks, transitive ore:
The god that wrought, that god dismiss
To other cloud, and there ignite
Another thought, another rite.




ALL ROADS LEAD EVERYWHERE

“Money was invented ostensibly to do two things: to make wealth portable and to proclaim the power of rulers. This medium of exchange, from the start, was a means of manipulating the thoughts of the people who had it and the people who wanted it. Distribution of wealth has always been the province of rulers and of the people riding the coattails of rulers. Money makes wealth easier to distribute. Money makes it easier for rulers to dominate. When the ruler is good and wise, this facilitation can seem almost benign, but when he is not good and wise...”—Kam Hijat

Adam Maker was an alcoholic, a falling-down, stinking drunk. And he was a race-car driver when he was drunk, a Mario Andretti of the Puking Circuit. In fact, he was such a professional drunk that he didn’t even puke anymore—except when he’d been forced to be a day or so without the companionship of his long-time, good-time friends Stoli and J.D. Well, they really weren’t good friends anymore, but they were friends that kept a crappy time from being a shooty time or a take-a-header-off-the-nearest-high-level-bridge time.
Adam Maker wasn’t a particularly evil or indecent man, but he was a man fully fed up to the gills with living. He was a fish in an asphalt river, swimming with the flow, turning off at this tributary or that, but never getting anywhere real. He felt his life was like that of an immortal salmon, surviving each year’s spawn. When he tried to swim upstream, he got precisely to the spawning-ground, fertilized enough eggs to keep the cycle going, and then died and washed out to sea—only to find himself resurrected so he could do it all again. Many was the day he wished a bear would reach in a paw and snag him struggling upstream, or floating dead-eyed downstream: it didn’t matter, as long as it ended in some way that mattered to someone—even if that someone was a predator that needed to feed off your carcass.
So, if driving in an alcoholic stupor killed somebody, he was sure the scavengers would get a good feed out of the smoking wreckage. He sure hoped there would be smoking wreckage when it happened—smoulder and smudge and stink amid a mangle and a jumble. A thundering explosion and fireball would also be good. If you’re gonna go, he thought, make sure somebody’s got a real mess to deal with. None of that damned passing with dignity for me.
And he was sure it would happen. Since he was relatively decent, he really hoped he would just wrap his car around some big, immovable thing that ambushed him from the roadside. Rather that than hurting, maiming, or killing someone else who suffered from the illusion that existence was not the living craphole that he knew it to be. He was Adam, and he had eaten the fruit, and he knew reality for what it was. Right out of Eden and into the dust! 
It happened just that way—well almost just that way. He got together with that horrible creature, the boy he thought had been made just for him. And the raven-haired boy knew how sexy he was, dammit! Adam liked sci-fi, so he called those broad shoulders and narrow hips the Thruster Pack and the other side the Disruptor Cannon. He was both the starship Enterprise and a Klingon Bird-of-Prey for Adam—high, brave adventure, and hunting, conquering brutality. Adam loved him like Scotty loved his warp engines, but if he loved Adam at all, he loved him like a Klingon loves a photon torpedo.
Back to the Garden. Adam and the Starship had moved together into the fifth floor of a seven floor walk-up, just high enough in the sky to look down with disdain upon those who did not know the heights of pleasurable life, but still low enough to be reminded that there was something bigger overlooking. And, they had a small terrace, albeit an unsafe-looking box of black bars, but nonetheless with a potted plant garden of herbs and mums and such crowded onto it. It was a great place for the two spacefarers to launch themselves, experience their turbulent, disturbing and fulfilling adventures, and then return to idyllic earth. The Starship was a wild beast in the most beautiful human form, and Adam did not quite trust him, but it didn’t matter because they were there, in that place at that time, and God was watching. Certainly the God who had created him would watch over him and keep him safe.
But that’s the funny thing about gods of all sorts, including the God god: they have their own plans, and they don’t much care what you think of The Plan. Adam thought Starship was his Rib, but that ship had left dock a really long time ago and warped away into some unknown nebula. The Garden was just a run-of-the-mill apartment, but it did have both a snake and a tempter in it. Adam had tasted the fruit that so many had told him was forbidden him, but it wasn’t the fruit that had shown him the truth: it was the snake. The serpent bit him, and its poison coursed through his veins, and the only way to stave off the eternally burning pain was bottle after bottle of burning antidote.
And so, Adam Maker found himself in the heat of the night in somebody else’s Stingray, flowing, thrusting down the highway just outside the city at speeds that really drive a man back in his seat, a bottle of pilfered Smirnoff in one hand, screaming “Whole Lotta Love” along with the radio, rills of vodka-spittle trailing behind his open mouth. He could barely make out the bucking Bimini Road in front of the stolen car with the top down, wind and booze blurring his eyes, and the view melted again and again into the face of his beautiful Bird-of-Prey as he fired his loving hatred again and again. Adam’s head jerked back over and over as if he were being physically pummeled by that hateful, perfectly-shaped fist with its impossibly hard knuckles. The phantasmal fist came back spattered and dripping red every time, but not coated with its own blood.
“I’m a man!” Adam screamed. “I’m a full-grown man. No one does this to me!” But he knew he was lying. The sleek, high-flying Starship, master and sole object of his self-absorbed universe, one time flesh of Adam’s flesh, could destroy Adam as many times as he wanted, could devastate him and despoil him, could degrade him and defame him in front of their friends—and there would never be any thought of leaving him while his gravity still held. The Starship was really a black hole—the overlay of the reality of reality over the unreality of the Grand Delusion assured him of this—and there would be no escaping that well of absolute darkness while he still remained on this earth under this sky. Adam could see in the rearview mirror the stars cascading down and melting into the fading light of the city that could barely contain the emotional force of the beloved, behated Starship. As he stared back at the impossibility of continuing life, the Door of Absolute Night slammed down on him.


There was the Darkness, which became darkness. Then the darkness faded to a pinkish grey and then to full, alarming pink. Then the shutters drew aside and fluttered up and down in the yellow conflagration blasting in from the rectangular aperture. Screams of agony burst from him, and agony signals came in from all over his body. And loud beeping noises joined in, and “Blah, bluh, blablablabla, blat!” came echoing on from a point somewhere to the right. He had no thoughts about this—only pain.
Suddenly, some roundish thing attached to a rough rectangle blocked out most of the hideous, yellow light. He felt a revoltingly intimate touch on his forehead, and he batted at it, but the contact with the intruding appendage caused his head to explode in agonies that dwarfed the previous pain. And now, atop all the other horrible sensations, he felt course, rubbing irritations over most of his body, and he was experiencing the most terrible pressures on his downward side.
He wanted it to stop immediately, but he seemed to have no means of expression beyond screaming and writhing. To top it all off, he began to feel wet, but relieved in some lower part of himself, but it was foul to smell, and there was some pasty nastiness clinging to him. And the cacophony continued, and the light was no longer eclipsed. The Darkness returned.
Eventually, the Darkness eased into shadow-ridden Greyness, permeated, punctuated by a steady, but intermittent beep. The shadows sometimes resolved into definite, mobile shapes, and noises were emitted that seemed to come from their locations, but none of it made any sense. Sometimes, when he drifted almost back into the Darkness, the shadows and their sonic emanations took on a rhythm, and that was both pleasant and disturbing, but it had no meaning.
The terrible yellow flame came again, and with it the agony returned, though noticeably less intense this time. Only moans escaped his lips, and his muscles only clenched to the degree that sharp, tangled pains flooded him. This was bearable. Still, it was a great relief when the blazing orb rose upward behind the ceiling of billowing grey beyond the rectangular aperture.
He could see all around him, a three-hundred sixty degree field, and after his time of oblivious hell, he could even put names on some of the things he saw. Bed. Window. Sheet. Nurse? Doctor? Ping-ping machine? Starship? Oh, God, no. What was the Starship doing orbiting this sector? A moment of panic—then calm acceptance. If the Starship tried any sadistic tricks—well, how could he hurt Adam any more than he hurt right now?—and maybe he’d get caught at it. The Starship was a tool—in any sense you’d care to consider—and not too bright when he didn’t have any particular purpose.
Adam put that thought aside, for Richard Callindo was little more than a vague abstraction at this point. Something was wrong with his ability to see: he shouldn’t be able to. His eyes had been burnt out somehow. He could still feel an indescribable conflagration in his sockets—and he thought he could recall the echo of some sympathetic voice saying something about a fiery car crash—whatever a car happened to be. Maybe he was a car. Never mind. Later. There was the holocaust of his face, and some sort of rasping material covering that ruination. Somehow, he knew he should not be capable of eyesight.
And the sounds. How could he hear with such acuity? He could hear his heart beating, his lungs wheezing with machine regularity, his blood rushing, his intestines burbling and squeaking, his sheets rustling ever-so-slightly. He could hear the ping-ping apparatus. He could hear nurses and doctors and patients and visitors—and other ping-ping machines. He could hear roars, rumbles, and beepings from beyond his walls. He could hear the easy, soft, contemptuous, intake/outflow of the Starship at idle.
But he knew he had no ears.
He knew his nose was a melted stump, and his tongue had received third-degree burns. But he could smell and taste—cleaners, disinfectants, medicines of various sorts, blood, tears, sweat, infections, old food, water, coffee, three brands of cigarettes, perfume—even a whiff of nasty exhaust from some kind of engine. It was all too much. Again came Darkness.
Again came Grey. Adam was neither conscious nor unconscious, in that he assigned no particular moral or abstract quality to anything: there were only sensations. Or, rather, there was only Sensation, a singularity of sight/sound/feel/smell/taste—all one, overwhelming-but-barely-tolerable thing.
He would let it overwhelm him and carry him away. To where? Outward. Out of his mangled, incinerated husk. Beyond the bed. Beyond the ping-ping machine. Beyond doctors and nurses and patients and cleaners and medicines. Beyond walls. Especially, far beyond the Starship.


            Scene: The night is lit by three campfires. The drums beat like a slowly thumping heart. Some people sit and some pass to and fro, bearing food and drink. Some of the people are tall, thin, and blond. Others are shorter, raven-haired, broad-shouldered, and narrow-hipped. A skeletal old man, once quite tall, clad in an elk cloak, sits cross-legged next to the drummer. Near him are seated a dozen elderly men and women, some of whom resemble him (and he resembles the tall blond people), and some of whom resemble the raven-haired people. There are teepees to the left and to the right.

            Old Man: I was born into a happy life.
            Elders: The People are happy.
            Old Man: I have lived many, many happy days.
            Elders: Thick days and thin days.
            Old Man: I have walked under blue skies, and I have walked under grey skies.
            Elders: The sun has burnt us brown; the rain has made us sing.
            Old Man: I have walked in forests, and I have walked in caves.
            Elders: We have met the brown bear; we have met the cave bear.
            Old Man: I have rolled in grass, and I have rolled in streams.
            Elders: We have rolled with lovers; we have rolled with foes.
            Old Man: I have raised fine sons, and I have raised fine daughters.
            Elders: The clan has grown tall and strong.
            Old Man: I walk now under stars, and I call to the bear and the wolf.
            Elders: The lion calls; the vulture waits.
            Old Man: I go out from the clan to a happy death.
            Elders: Spear in hand; honored death.
            Old Man: I am ready; my strength is with me.
            Elders: Death come soon; honored death.

            The old man arises and takes up his spear. He smiles, and then he hugs and kisses each member of his clan. He smiles again and laughs, turns, and walks proudly out into the night.

            Old Man: Look for me in the morning dew. Listen for me in the laughter of children.
            Clan: We will see you wherever we look. Our memories will hear you, whenever we listen.


Somehow, he was outside the hospital (?), looking back inward through the window. There was the bridge of Starship Richard. How easily, it seemed, he might reach out and crack that hull. Yes, he could trepanate his lover and let out the evil spirit that had taken over the staunch and dedicated crew that operated inside that beautiful shell. Oh, well, he thought. Maybe I’ve carried this metaphor as far as it needs to go. Mr. Sulu, any heading; Warp Factor 9.
Anyway, something else now had a grip on his attention. On the other side of his lover-hater was a thing he believed to be a bed, although it was partially obscured by devices of various sorts with read-outs, with the ping-ping machine, and with drip bags full of mostly clear fluids. Upon the bed was a fiber-encased figure, maybe a mummy or a chrysalis, a thing of vaguely human form, infested with tubes and electrodes of many descriptions. He studied this figure for several minutes before he comprehended the significance of it. It was completely enshrouded, what there was of it. There was no right leg at all. The left arm was missing from the elbow down. The head appeared to have a sizable dent. There were great swaths of dried blood on the bandages and on the sheets below. And though he could recognize the thing on the bed, he felt it was alien, for he had no connection to it, no affinity with it or empathy towards it. He did not share its agonies. He turned from it and continued his expansion.
He was obviously in a large and heavily-populated place. The hospital was tall. The nearby buildings were taller. There was a lot of noise and activity outside the sundry edifices—and inside. There was noisome smoke filling the air, and underneath were the more subtle odors of fresh and rancid food and drink, sweat, bad breath, disease, excrement, and even colognes, flowers, and sex. As he absorbed the great stone and steel constructs, winds caromed from below, winds strong enough it seemed to blast a human into the ionosphere. But he was unperturbed and continued on his way.
His radius quickly contained all the miles of the great inner city. And the Sensation should have destroyed him. No human could possibly absorb all this. But he did not truly absorb it, or retain it, or contain it. He felt he was it. Sensation was spread out among a million receptacles—and he was all of them. He knew it was far easier to be separated from an arm and a leg than ever to be separated from the total entity he had become. To lose even the smallest sliver of it would be to lose himself. May Christ forgive!, it would be an agony greater than any agony ever suffered by a human being. But then, he was not certain he was a human being any more. He was perhaps a simple Being, and Beings could perhaps withstand all the hurts ever devised.
The Being was obtaining more being. He was becoming sleepy/sleepless, peaceful/ anxiety-brimming suburbs, and reservoirs and superhighways. He had become a hundred libraries, and ten million people, and hundreds of millions of plants and animals. He was transceiving something called Internet, and suddenly he was expanding at a rate that was beyond even his newfound comprehension.
As he made his diodal connections, he began to haphazardly conquer cities, and digital fortresses, and all the high and low places of the bustling human world. Nothing was hidden from him.
From his billion beachheads, he strode into land, sea, and air. He rode the lightnings and blew on the storms. He bathed in turquoise lagoons and cracked in high ice. He writhed in auroras and wafted on dandelion down.
He was great and terrible. He was miniscule and vulnerable. He was the world, its heats, its ices, its turmoils, and its serenities. The world could not now contain his expansiveness: his understandings only fed his outwardness. There was MORE, and it would not be denied.
The cloud of satellites and debris was within him almost before he was aware of it. He felt he might be able to lash out and destroy the military and commercial crutch of his age, and for a nanosecond he resisted the urge to try—and then all that clutter was simply a part of the All, and of no greater significance than any other part.
The moon, the tranquil Eye of Night and quest of ages was noted and taken in only a moment later. It was a ball of dusty ambition, hot and bright on one side, cold and dark on the other; like all ambition, sexy and poetic from a distance, stark and extravagant up close. Before this thought even penetrated his consciousness, his own ambitionless ambition was far beyond the feckless moon.
Mars, with no tentacled monsters in sight, and no particular Fear or Terror emanating from its orbiting demons. Venus, with no seductive Venusian women. Bumping and grinding space rocks. Desolate Mercury. Noted, catalogued, included. Only infinitely diluted emotions attached.
As he dilated toward the bright hellscape of bubbling, whirling, bursting megafire at the heliocenter of it all, he knew he could not be burned, and so it seemed to him there should be no cause for alarm. This was no more overwhelming than any of the other phenomena that he had become. Yet, he felt a niggling, nagging sense of something unpleasant coming on—not the sun itself, but something impending, some potential realization that might start an undesirable chain reaction. Nonetheless, he took into him the sun—and it was warm and loving, and violent and hateful; he decided to rename it Richard.
From that point, something changed, at first imperceptibly, as he came upon Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and the clouds of planetoids, ice, rock, and dust beyond. The sun was no longer hot and present in him, but it seemed to have been left far behind. He was cold and distant, and where he had achieved oneness and a sort of understanding, the oneness was fading to aloneness, and the understanding was transformed to withstanding. He was still going outward at a pace faster-than-light, but he was no longer flowing into a greater reality: he was flowing out of reality. He was like the sun as he now perceived it, a star growing dim as its energies spread out too far to maintain its promises of eternal sustenance, sacred revelation, familiar embrace.
Out he flowed into the imponderable interstellar dark. The galactic disc was lit up with millions of fiery pinpricks, and the grip of the supermassive black hole at the galactic center could be felt even here, but these phenomena were all unfamiliar and the study of millennia. That distant nagging was now grown into a low-grade migraine of fear. The distances were incomprehensible even in his amazing state, as fear began to erode the power of that state.
As he approached alpha, beta, and gamma Centauri, the fear suddenly transmogrified into a monstrous terror of who-knows-what. The heat of the triple-star began to burn him. That he could feel the heat increased his horror. He tried to be brave. But he truly understood that he was becoming/had become something other than/beyond human. He felt for the first time that he might have died, that he might be a lingering spirit, afraid to enter Heaven or Hell, and so wandering the Maze of Life, hoping desperately to leave the Place-Between-Places, to regain his wrecked body and live in it as much as it could be lived in. Existence as an entrapped, maimed, humanly-limited blob of protoplasm was safe and comprehensible. He did not want to become the universe, only to live in it, to live and die as a human lives and dies. All those people, and all those objects plodding about within him, though they had the hallmarks of life, were not any kind of life he could truly understand, emotions and ambitions all distant to him/from him, a product of natural forces and not of intimate, living wills. He cried out that he would live his life in thrall to Richard Callindo if that was the only way he could get life!
He snapped back into his Adam Maker form like an over-tensioned rubber band, flailing, inflicting pain. He collapsed back into his little self like an expended supernova, throwing off a last, terrible gasp of excess energy. He imploded into a whirling, writhing singularity of welcome loss, pleasurable, woeful diminution.
Adam’s attendant machines were beeping and wailing in delighted madness. Faces hovered and orbited his shipwreck in excited concern. Careering about him was a bedazzling cacophony, a tempest, of noises, colors, odors, and hot breath. But what most amazed him was that he, in himself, felt nothing, physically or emotionally. He was certain now that he was, indeed, dead, and he wondered why his senses persisted and refused to give up the ship.
Even as Adam regained himself, he lost himself.
And then came the woman with the paddles. And then came the sheets of silver agony, and his ruined form contorting, twitching, trying to shred itself from the inside.
Adam could feel his demise—from a distance, it seemed, almost as if he were bearing witness to the final exhalations of a stranger he had met in the street. It was all but meaningless to him, remotely sad in the same way it’s sad to see a little bird crushed and mouldering in the road.
Adam wanted to be sad, wanted to be angry, wanted to be relieved—even wanted to be ECSTATIC. It wouldn’t come. He was, without even an unreasonable doubt, quite deceased, disintegrated, flown directly into the heart of the star that was himself—and yet something persisted.
It wasn’t the spirit of Adam Maker that refused to depart to regions unknown. There was no such entity, and if he had been in a more lively state, so to speak, he would have been devastated to learn this secret. He was a locality now, a point-of-view—as he realized he always had been—naked now, unclothed by flesh, a thing of space-time, no longer a thing of matter-energy. His change was a change of state. And he was expanding again, becoming the universe again, everything, everywhere, all-at-once. He wanted this everythingness as much as he had wanted it before. It would be the end of him as himself. He would have no point of view, for he would be an infinitely non-localized existence, nothing because he was everything.
It was infinitely unacceptable. But what could he do? He was certain this was his natural state, was everyone’s natural state, upon becoming truly, irrevocably unclothed.
Was this the Heaven that God had promised? Was it Hell? If so, there was no truth-in-advertising. No, this was Heaven and Hell as one thing, as all things were One Thing. God was existence. There could be no doubt of that now, Creator and Creation as one, as all things are One. If you took pleasure in the thought of being one with your God, you would become Heaven, infinite pleasure. If this idea horrified you, you would be Hell, a moment of infinite abhorrence frozen forever as you achieved the requisite Oneness. Love it or hate it, all things are One, have always been One, will continue to become One. It was clear to him, having sloughed off his sluggish matter-energy state, that Oneness must be all there is. Existence is a Gem of Infinite Facets. Each point in space-time-energy-matter-gravity-electromagnetism-nuclear force is a peculiar facet, a truly unique point-of-view. If he became the totality of the Gem, he would have no unique point-of-view, but would be all the facets, all-at-once, for eternity. There would be nothing further to be or to know. It would all be clear and static, and therefore unimportant to him. Whatever the coalesced Zeitgeist of existence was, in all states, places, and times smooshed into One, that was what he would Be—for there would be nothing else to be when one was One.
Though emotion was mostly gone from him altogether, its remnants eroding and soughing away as he expanded into/became all of existence, he found this idea unacceptable even as an intellectual exercise. That he should come into being at some point in time and space, be forced to endure living, and then wink out—or rather, be stubbed out like a used up cigarette...this was too much to believe. Apparently, ego survives body-death, or at least his own ego survived. He seemed to hear ghostly laughter tracking him from his center back into the hospital—but the sardonic humor diluted to infinite recession as he continued to be absorbed into the All.
But maybe ego was not the correct term for his condition, especially considering that he had already within him nonillions of egos. Maybe he was something more like a seed, a nascent thought preparing to spring forth into meaningfulness. He was, he imagined, like a fruit waiting to be borne upon a limb and nurtured into good food by the mighty strength and health of a tree that existed within him. Odin had hung nine days upon Yggdrasil, nine days dead, waiting to be resurrected by the Tree of Life, to be reborn with the essential knowledge of the runes. The death sacrifice of the greatest of gods had been rewarded with life renewed and the ability to cast spells and divine past, present, and future. What amazing knowledge would be gained by the sacrifice of Adam Maker?
And with that question came a sudden burst of insight. Maybe he had just taken into his circumference some ancient and wise being whose intelligence he could never have encountered in any other way. It came to him like a ray of light that stole out among glowering storm clouds. Humans have always talked and thought in terms of this or that, the thing known by its opposite, all-or-nothing. But what if seeming opposition was not that at all, but rather a thing or an idea sort of turned inside-out, inverted? What if dark was the inverse of light?
If so, what was the inverse of his current, undesirable state? How could he reach into his infinite becoming, wrench out its innards so they would become its outards, and make a new, tolerable state?
Adam could find no viable answer. He had already become over a trillion cultures, and there seemed to be neither an individual nor a group intelligence that could inform him. He even absorbed a Dyson Sphere so huge it contained three star systems, and in it dwelt a gaseous entity that was as large as two-hundred main sequence stars, and it was aware of him as he became it—but it had already been absorbed a googolplex of times—and it did not possess his answer.
A stray thought came to him as his radius approached the outer edges of his universe at speeds millions of times faster-than-light (and therefore all hope was fleeing him at an equal rate). He was nearly an entire universe of intelligences. He was entire planets that functioned as neural nets. But it was all so diffuse and so, barely accessible. He was a few forgotten lines of junk code attempting to operate a super-computer.


            Scene: Nine figures in dirty-white, hooded robes stand in a semicircle on the first step of the amphitheatre. The figure in the middle steps forward onto the amphitheatre floor. The forward figure holds up its arms, spreading them wide. It turns in place until it has made a full revolution.

Chorus Leader: Gaiandros Technon is a god among men, son of Helios and Maia. The union of these two gods was forbidden by Zeus from the time he took up his kingship, for where sunfire meets earth, the world of Men is laid waste. But mighty Zeus had killed Phaethon, first son of Helios, when Phaethon stole the sun-chariot, and wrecked it, and set the earth on fire. Helios must have a son, and so, in a secret tryst. he went into the caves of Kyllene, and made a son with Maia the oread. But the spies of Zeus are everywhere, and he became aware of the pregnancy. He would suffer it on one condition only: the boy must believe himself mortal. He must be given over to mortal parents. His footsteps must always be directed away from Olympus. All gods must shun him and never bless him. He must be made to loathe himself and think himself the lowest of the low, so that all Men will see him likewise and never laud him or seek him out for any reason other than to abuse him.

            The speaker then steps back into the semicircle of the Chorus.
            A figure, tall and thin, golden-haired, but dirty and barefoot, dressed in a tattered tunic of sackcloth, totters down the steps of the amphitheatre through the audience (all of whom are men, women, and children who are black-haired, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped). The audience hisses at the man, and if he staggers too near one of them, that one shoves him away (and the shover then rubs his hands on his own tunic). The figure of Gaiandros Technon means as he approaches the theatre floor. Stage hands have meanwhile brought in a prop that looks like the top of a well. A man in a hooded, blue robe stands beside the well, holding a golden bucket on a bronze chain. In the robed man’s right hand is a silver ladle that drips a liquid colored like honey.
            The miserable man in the sack tunic approaches the well.

            Blue-Robed Man: No further. This water is not for you.
            The Chorus: Heed well the admonition of King Zeus.
            Gaiandros: I thirst. Before Gods and Men I swear that I thirst near to death.

            Gaiandros moans and clasps his throat.

            Blue-Robed Man: This water is Life. This water is not for you.
            The Chorus: The lips of Man shall not taste Nectar.
           
            Gaiandros drops to his knees, weeping without tears.

            Gaiandros: Death has denied me even the comfort of mother and father. I have found neither friend nor wife. Beggars and slaves mock me, and kick me, and spit on me. Would that I had even such water now! Shall I now, at last, be denied life itself?
            Blue-Robed Man: Yes, this place of life is forbidden you. You have stumbled upon the Well of Hermes. The drink I have to give, you, of all people must never taste.
            The Chorus: The lips of this Man shall not taste Nectar.

            The blue-robed man shrugs off his robe. His appearance is the same as that of Gaiandros, except that he is clean, and laurel-wreathed, and clad in a tunic of blue silk, and golden wings are upon his sandals.
            Gaiandros looks up, his hands clasped in prayer.

            Gaiandros: You are Him! You can tell me, Lord!
            The Chorus: Yes, it is him: Hermes, son of Zeus by Maia. Ask no more!
            Hermes: I know your question. I will not answer you. I will not give you this Water, for Zeus would slay you. But neither will I, though Zeus has commanded me, repel you. If you wish to live, you must not drink here. Find other water. Yes, find the water of Lethe. Drink such water and forget, for a time.
            The Chorus: Yes, go to the hidden river and drink. Do not draw the lightning here.
            Gaiandros: I must drink here or end here. They drove me out of Aporitos when I tried to dip into their well. The priest of Apollo would not suffer me, for he said my hideousness hurt his eyes. He said I would curse the water and draw to his people the wrath of Olympus. Why? What thing have I done? What sin lies upon me? What more sacrifice will be required of me?
            The Chorus: Blameless, but endlessly blamed. The fault lies with Chaos, out of which rose Gods and Men.

            Gaiandros sobs weakly, without tears. Hermes weeps golden saltwater.

            Hermes: Do not drink, my little brother. Let me carry you away to Hades. I will speak for you.
            The Chorus: Go to Hades at last. Let all be done.
            Gaiandros: Why, Lord? Why must I die without having lived?
            The Chorus: All weep!

            The audience begins to weep.

            Hermes: If I answer with truth, Zeus will strike you down, and he will devise some means to properly punish me.
            Gaiandros: Then what does it matter? Tell me, and let us have done.
            Hermes: The pain matters. Zeus will prolong your death to spite me. I cannot be responsible for your suffering. Let me carry you away and put an end to your suffering, and maybe my father will spare us both. I may not heal you, and I may not give you the life you deserve. But you are blameless. Surely, Hades will see this. Surely, he can give you Elysium and still obey the command of Zeus.
            The Chorus: Zeus is thunder and lightning. Zeus is just. Zeus is king.

            With this, Gaiandros collapses and moves no more. Hermes places coins on his eyes, picks up his limp body, and carries him out of the amphitheatre in the direction opposite the way he came in. The audience moans as he passes away.

            The Chorus: The paths of Gods and Men were set for them when Chaos became Order. The rhyme and reason are the Mystery. Even King Zeus has not solved the Mystery. We act and are acted upon. The cruel doom and the glorious fate: both spin out from the fundament of Chaos. They are the price paid for Order.

            The members of the Chorus throw back their hoods and laugh. They all look exactly like Gaiandros and Hermes. The audience joins in the laughter. The merriment is magnified by the bowl of the amphitheatre and is hurled up into the sky.


And now it was done. He was the current universe. As it expanded, he expanded with it. But he had spread out only along one axis, so to speak. He had become the universe-as-it-currently-is—And now he found himself spreading outward along the other axis.
Each Planck-time is one generation of the universe (even taking into account the relativity of time). Each generation, the universe re-calculates itself according to its rules of operation as they were modified by the actions that took place in the previous generation, all the things that could and did occur during one Planck-time. Each Planck-time represents one version of the universe. It is essentially one universe in itself, connected to past and future universes by the chains of causation.
Adam had not known this in any meaningful way. He had, though he loved sci-fi, never been adept at science. He had only a vague idea of Dyson Spheres because of Star Trek.
Now he found himself becoming all the generations of the universe, achieving Oneness with numbers of Planck-times that constituted more zeroes than he could fathom. He was spreading out through time, into the past, into the future, and his rate of transformation/absorption was accelerating. It was all over in what seemed to him an instant or two. He was now all of space-time in universe nine-hundred seventy-two quadrillion three-hundred forty-eight trillion nine-hundred six billion five-hundred one million sixty thousand four-hundred and two.
He was now EVERYTHING. He was now God, yes? He was now static. It was The End (—and The Beginning, and The Middle).
He was everything. He had and felt no need to explore. He knew he could not explore. He was the Gem of Innumerable Facets. Every thought that had ever been thought was within him; they were all meaningless to him in this state. All of heaven and earth was currently being/would be dreamt of in his philosophy. Every emotion that was ever felt was known to him; they were all the intake and outlet of heavy breath to him—hysterical hyperventilation. Countless entities fretted and strutted within him, full of sound and fury—and their fates were set before they came onto the stage. Every creature that ever lived he was; life was of no particular value to him, neither cheap nor expensive, and it was both overvalued and undervalued by those who had it. They all live/lived and all dissolved into their elements when life left them.
One of those lives stood out to him, for he had, in his matter-energy life, been an actor and aspiring playwright. A few words came floating to his awareness, unbidden, out of the numberless words that had ever been uttered (many of them words that no human voice could ever pronounce). “And this, our life,” declared some overblown ego in a chamber of echoes, “exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
He took this as a cue and a clue. It was weighty, and true, but he could find no particular impetus in it—beyond the impetus to discover an impetus. He thought that if he could experience a human emotion, maybe frustration, or hate, or sadness, or even joy, he might receive the inspiration that was on offer. No such spark lit him. He experienced all emotions, everywhere, simultaneously, and so this put anything immediate and useful infinitely out of reach.
But he was not denied Sensation. And he could feel something, nagging, itching, squirming, insidious. He was static, everything. He was a complete, moment-by-moment slideshow of the universe. Everything that had ever happened was duly noted and catalogued. Nothing should be moving. Nothing should be obscured.
He felt something like hot breath on his neck, like the much-fabled pressure of someone’s stare. But he had no neck, except all the necks that ever were, and there were no other eyes to behold him: he was all the eyes. Had he been humanly human he would no doubt  have experienced  the thrill of terror.  This was,  after all, the point in the horror movie when the killer stood in the shadows regarding his prospective victim. It was when you were unaware, when the feeling of doom subsided, having become no more than a fixture of the ambience, that the killer leapt forth to do you in.
Maybe he had achieved the point of psychosis for a human who had become a thing that was too great for him by a googolplex of degrees. This was perhaps the point at which he stared into the abyss—and found it staring back. After all, what he had done was like a cell in his pinky toe dropping off one day and in its dying moment declaring itself to be the whole of his body. Or maybe it was like one cell in his brain developing a Louis the Fourteenth complex and shouting, “L’etat c’est moi!”
He wasn’t sure he could really become insane. His state represented the ultimate balance. And the killer couldn’t really kill him, anyway. He was fixed and eternal. He was Schrödinger’s Cat, alive and dead, with no one to open the box and generate the alternate universes, one in which he was the living cat, and one in which he was the dead cat.
One way of looking at it was that the cat was neither alive nor dead, until the box was opened and the decision made. The inverse way of looking at it was that the cat was alive, in an infinite number of states of health, and it was dead, in an infinite number of states of decomposition. There were, therefore, an infinite number of universes, and when you opened the box you confirmed which universe you were in. (That cat, of course, already knew which universe it was in before you opened the evil box in which some perverse bastard had imprisoned a cat!) By extension, when you did anything, you discovered which universe you were in: the one in which you took that action.
And there was the answer. There was a multiverse, and since he had not become all these universes, they were not static to him. He was one universe, and they all overlapped him. There was nothing beyond the space in which the universe existed, so all universes, all spaces, existed in the same space and overlapped each other at all points. They were simply out of phase with one another and so could coexist without destroying each other. But, on rare occasions, something would happen in one of the universes that would throw one or more parts of it into the same phase as another universe. This was the crawling feeling, the pulsing feeling, the feeling that, since he was all the stomachs in this universe, nauseated him all the way through his existence. But he was the universe, and the universe was not him: the universe did not feel queasy on his behalf—though there were a significant number of beings at any given moment feeling queasy on their own behalf—and so shared that much solidarity with him.
So, the multiverse was real. That meant there were an infinite number of universes in which Adam Maker had made other decisions and an infinite number in which he had made the decision that had produced this state. And it probably meant there were an infinite number in which someone else had become the universe in the same way he had, or some other way, if there was another way to do it. And at some point, all these universes intersected with all the other universes...
There it was. He was, instantly, all universes, all possible existences. And somehow, though he had melded with all other minds, all other things, all other states, all other phases, he remained, amongst all the faces of the Gem of Infinite Facets, one facet that was doomed to perceive all other facets. He was all the lattices and cleavages and polished cuts. He was every point of view. He was every possible thing. He was sex. He was hate. He was love. He was hunger. He was indulgence. He was conqueror. He was conquered. He was desert. He was rain. He was truly EVERYTHING and every means by which it had come to be. He was every purpose that had ever been conceived. And so, he was meaningless. He was averaged out. He was this, but he was also that, and that, and that—and that, that, that, that, that...
There it was. There it is. There it will always be.
This was not God. He was not God. God was not ineffectual.
And he still did not have his answer: what was the way out of all this BEING?
The inverse of BEING is NOTHINGNESS, right? Real nothingness, not a simple void, in which space-time exists despite the material absence. Real nothingness was far beyond absence. It was isn’t, never was, never could be.  Being is an infinitesimal pinprick in the infinitely non-existent non-fabric of non-being.


            Scene: A dimly-lit 1950s living room, in the middle of which sits a wooden black-and-white console television. A pre-teen boy, raven-haired, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, turns on the power, and the television screen begins to resolve.
            After a commercial for the Wizzy Wieselstein Goofy Hour, the words, The Nightfall Region, appear, accompanied by the tumbling shapes of rubber bands, hypodermic needles, and sleep blindfolds. These dissolve and are replaced by a thin, light-haired man in a dapper grey suit, standing slightly sideways—Todd Sperling, host of the weekly show, The Nightfall Region.
            The image of a heavy-laden apple tree appears to audience left.

            Todd Sperling: Good evening devotees of the surreal truth. Tonight, we explore Original Sin. For many, the Original Sin was Adam taking that first delicious bite of the Forbidden Apple in God’s Garden, breaking the First Injunction. For some, Original Sin was obtaining the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thus becoming responsible for our actions. And, for some, it was crossing a boundary, from obedience to disobedience of the Parent, from childhood to adulthood, from dependence on Authority to independence.
            Is Sin the breaking of the Laws of God, thus engaging the Almighty Wrath? Is Sin the Knowledge of the Rightness and Wrongness of all we do, making Mankind the Self-Cursed species? Does Sin lie in the passage from Childhood to Adulthood? Should we, to avoid Everlasting Damnation and Torment, remain children at heart forever?
            This man believes he knows.

            An image of Adam Maker, dressed as Robin Hood—and looking remarkably like Todd Sperling—appears on-screen.

            Todd Sperling: Meet our subject, Mister Adam Maker, star of stage, screen, and film. He is about to have the experience of a trillion lifetimes—or is that deathtimes? Is he about to discover the key to the greatest Mysteries—or is he merely another satisfied customer of the cosmic department store that we call—the Nightfall Region?


All his life Adam Maker had become someone else as a matter of survival. Baby Adam had learned to stop squawking and start smiling if he wanted to get the things one needs to get beyond infancy. Child Adam had learned to stop asking and start listening to avoid chastisement and friendlessness. Adolescent Adam had learned to stop looking at guys and start liking girls if he wanted to avoid trips to the E.R. Adult Adam had learned to become an actor, a professional make-believe artist, to avoid himself. The only thing he had ever sort of done to express his true self was go out in public on the arm of Richard Callindo. He had softened the blow by making his way to Broadway; his family and friends thus suspected he might be more than a little light-in-the-loafers. All those New York actor types were, of course, queers, or at best half-queers. And so, even in displaying some part of his real self, Adam was playing the expected role.
And with Richard, it was a dominant-submissive relationship—and guess who was the submissive. And this, too, was as expected, since, among straight folk, this was the stereotype of male-male love. Richard, too, played his role to the hilt. Richard had his own story. There was perhaps room in all the universes to grant a space for compassion flowing in the direction of poor Richard.
Adam Maker could become anything else—including a limitless number of universes. But could he become NOTHINGNESS? In the most superficial sense, he had always been nothing, since he had always been what was expected—even the car crash was typical of a tormented fag, right? But that sort of nothingness was a whole lot of illusory somethingness. And there had always been a hidden—even from himself—core of Adamness.
If he became NOTHING, he would truly cease to be. That was not the inverse of BEING. It was the opposite, the only true opposite. It was the only real binary: NOTHING or EVERYTHING. He was all universes, but no universe was him. Unlike the Adam of the Garden, who got to name everything, Adam of the Theater had never really put his original stamp on anything. The inverse of BEING EVERYTHING was not ABSOLUTE NOTHINGNESS, it was everything becoming Adam. He must put his stamp on all of it, like a little kid writing his name on all the stuff in the house to claim it away from his evil, scum-sucking-brother-who-was-always-taking-and-ruining-his-stuff.
So, he willed it all to become him, to be at his command, unable to refuse his most unreasonable whim. Nothing seemed to happen. And what was going to happen? An entity who was everything was no particular thing. And the human body called Adam Maker had never exerted his will upon anything more stubborn than a microwave dinner. He wasn’t Sauron, and he didn’t have Sauron’s Ring, and he hadn’t trained himself to the domination of other wills. He was a species of chameleon, and even chameleons had an innate core of predatory chameleonness. Didn’t he have some kind of fuck-it-all-and-give-me-what-I-want id?
Richard had such a core of irrational self-centeredness. Richard was Richard Callindo, dammit! If you didn’t like Richard, you could suck it! If you did like Richard, you could suck it, anyway.
It wasn’t about the domination of other wills for Richard; Richard was certainly no Sauron. It was about you acknowledging that Richard was Richard—and far more awesome than you. You should bow to Richard’s awesome Richardness.
There it was. He had a model. He was beyond intimately acquainted with Richard. A piece of him was actually Richard—and, by extension, all the other Richards in every universe that had one—which was an infinite number.

Richard infinity = Adam infinity

Okay. Everything had his stamp on it. Everything was him. Pointless. He was everything: everything was him: all the possibilities had already been expressed: nothing really changed. Well, his attitude changed—sort of. He could hear Suetonius saying: “Caesar is every woman’s man and every man’s woman.” Adam was everything, and everything was Adam. Pointless.
Nothing changed.
Nothing Changed.
Nothing CHANGED.
NOTHING changed.
NOTHING CHANGED.
And—NOTHING CHANGED.
He almost had a spasm of something like emotion.
Pointless.
All possibilities already accounted for.
Still ineffectual.

The multiverse was set and static. Every Planck-time generation was part of a flip-book of the universe. There was still the illusion of motion and free will. But the choice you made only revealed which universe you were in: the one in which the thing you chose to do was what you did.

This was not God. He was not God.
He had not found God.
He had found Omniscience.
He had found Omnipresence.
Where was Omnipotence?

He had not achieved the desired inversion. Omniscience and Omnipresence were not inverses of one another. They were essentially the same thing viewed from different angles.
Was Omnipotence the inverse of Omniscience ? What was it, then? How was it done?
                                                            Omnipresence
That question was easily answered, he supposed. If the multiverse was all possibilities all played out in infinite combination, then Power lay in controlling the possibilities, deciding what was possible and what was not.
He could not see how this Power of Decision could be achieved. Richard was no model for this aspect of Being. He simply played the part set for him. He was simply Richard, all the time—whatever that happened to mean at any given moment.
Except for God himself/herself/itself, there were no models. Even the greatest emperors that had ever been could not really control the potentialities within their realms, but could only manipulate the peoples’ perception of what the potentials were. And Adam suffered the curse of Paul Muad’dib. He could see all the possibilities and all the consequences of each action that he might take, all the chains of causation, but in the end he only served history by becoming it. Muad’dib initially thought that he commanded the future, summoned it to him, but he discovered that each decision he made only locked his universe ever more tightly onto a course into the future that had been set long into the past. Even God-Emperor Leto Atreides II, heir of Emperor Paul Muad’dib, could do no more than accept the potentials on offer and work with them to craft the future of humankind in his universe.

If he was right—and, of course, he was—Omniscience was the inverse of Omnipotence.
                                                                          Omnipresence
Omniscience was Everything. Omnipotence was the base of Everything. Nothingness was
Omnipresence
the opposite of Everythingness. Omnipotence was the control of all possibility. Between that which is and that which is not stands potential. Adam was Everything that is. He was impotent. He had simply become what already is, and he had taken all that already is and made it himself—and had accomplished essentially nothing. He had become a solipsism. Pointless.
He could certainly relieve himself of his pointlessness if he could achieve the opposite of himself: Nothingness. If he could become Nothing, he would cease his static existence by exchanging it for another form of stasis, the ultimate form. What was more static than nonexistence? Nothingness could also be seen as ultimately dynamic: there was no force to hinder your nothingness, no limits; filtered through the lens of potential, Nothingness could become Anything at all. Everythingness, the multiverse, was self-limiting: there were an unlimited number of cosmoses, but each contained only certain possibilities: only certain things happened in each universe—and all the things therein were bounded in space and time. Nothingness was the converse of Everythingness. Omnipresence was the complement of Omniscience. Ultimate dynamism was the inverse of ultimate stasis. Everythingness was static. Nothingness was static. The two ultimate states were static/dynamic. The Gem of Infinite Facets; the Black Bag in Which the Gem Is Held. Potentiality, Omnipotence was the Hand That Reaches in and Withdraws the Gem from the Bag. Omnipotence was the Place-Between-Places. Without the Hand, the Gem and the Bag are one and the same thing. And, in a way, this was the ultimate expression of Schrödinger’s Cat. Until the Hand withdrew the Gem from the Bag, there was no Gem.
Semantics. Metaphor. Pointless? If he had been humanly human, Adam’s head would have been spinning.
If he followed the logic of these semantics and metaphors, which, in his state, constituted actual reality and were not mere mental gymnastics, he was both Everythingness and Nothingness. And only the balance, Omnipotence, separated the obverse and the reverse of the Great Coin, bright and fulsome on one side, unbright and devoid on the other.
Omnipotence was unrealized Anything. It was both Nothing and Everything—and it was neither Everything nor Nothing. Omnipotence was the tangent that conjoined two overlapping spheres. Omnipotence was the tongue that translated Non-Being into Being, and it was the muteness that destroyed all transmission. To perform the function of Omnipotence was to interpret possibility. To do this, with or without Intention, was to be God.
Now, he realized that he was really not different from Richard. He had only taken a different approach. Richard was attractive because he was Richard. Adam was attractive because he was anything you wanted him to be. God was both himself/herself/itself—and everyone and everything else.
Together, Richard/Nothingness and Adam/Everythingness were Ahura Mazda.
To deny potential, and simultaneously oppose the static reality, was to be Ahriman. Together, Richard/Nothingness and Adam/Everythingness were Ahriman. Together, they were the matter-energy analog of God. And they were together in whatever this state he occupied could be called; Adam/Richard was God. Without Richard, Adam could not be God. Richard was Adam’s Eve, and they were with God, and they were God.
So, Adam was Everything, and he was Nothing, and he occupied the position between. He was God, and he met God. There were an uncounted number of ids and egos in the multiverse. There were countless superegos in the multiverse, countless Gods and only One God—countless Intentions that were only One Intention: Omnipotence. Each Intention made itself felt and known as a universe; each Intention was the God of its own universe. All Intentions were part and parcel of the Omnipotence: all Intentions were One Intention; all Gods were One God. Everythingness/Nothingness was static/dynamic. All Ways and One Way.
     
Adam Maker greeted God and was God.
Adam Maker was both Fate and Fated.

Adam Maker existed in a limitless number of universes that were his private Hell; in that sense, Hell was eternal. Adam Maker existed in countless, idyllic lives that were his very own Heaven. Adam Maker existed in an unguessable number of universes in Limbos of mediocrity. In an infinite number of existences, there was no Adam Maker. Adam Maker lived as an idea in an unfathomable number of universes in which some fool wrote stories about a man of infinite variety called Adam Maker. In an infinite number of cosmoses, Adam Maker was the fool who wrote these stories.


            Scene: Dimly lit stage with heath on the audience left, thicket on audience right, beaten path in between. In front, tussocks of tall, late-autumn grass. Enter, stage center rear, the great actor Atamo Artificieri, dressed as a green-clad woodsman with hand axe, bow, and quiver, in the role of Martin di Reggano, fugitive from the justice of Doge Federigo Consiligliana of the fictitious Republic of Coripolita.

            Reggano: But, hark!

            The Actor halts and leans toward the thicket, cupping hand to left ear.

            Reggano: What rhapsodious displeasures flutter my ear? ‘Tis the droning pipe of the high-born, his bed too hard, his meat too cold, his day too swift, his footman too slow.

            As Reggano speaks, there is no music to be heard by the audience. But then comes the muffled drone of Scottish pipes.

            Reggano: And, look!

            Reggano takes the hand from his ears and uses it to shield his eyes as he looks himself up and down. The pipes continue playing.

            Reggano: What’s this that insists itself upon my weak and weary eye? ‘Tis a bright nothing, a flitter of silver gnats. A man-thing it is, all gaudy-baubled, a candy-man, all kitted out to be sucked and et by the all-consuming mouth that eats all days.

            As Reggano speaks, a multi-colored sparkle, shaped in roughly human form, enters stage left, passing before Reggano from the heath into the thicket, close-pursued by a man dressed as a clock-face.

            Reggano: Nay! ‘Tis naught so great. ‘Tis a thing surveyed in mirror cracked, reflected as a thousand flies struggling in spider’s web, refracted as thousand-colored eyes searching blindly out. Those eyes rushed blindly in, and, multiplied, blind remain. Those eyes a thousand griefs never themselves shall see.

            As Reggano speaks, a backdrop drops directly behind him. It is a spiderweb-cracked mirror, each shard with an eye within. A very large spider crawls all round the surface. The shards all go black, and the spider retreats.
            Reggano straightens himself and then, arms outspread, head bobbing, dances like a marionette. He stops, puts right foot out with care.

            Reggano: Softly now! Slowly now! Lest you rouse up festering addles that linger among the tussocks. Best you smell not the production of those wasted innards that sag and sway atop these waddling gambols. Step lightly! Step lively through the witherstench field ploughed and sown in your headlong days.

            Reggano gingerly takes a few steps forward among the high tussocks. The Actor waggles his cloak.

            Reggano: Feel that.

            The Actor lifts his head toward the unseen balcony.

            Reggano: This zephyr, Heaven-sent, redeem! Make fresh again harrowed will and misspent thew! Let withering fruit of auld grievance fall far from tree and be et away by crawling things. Let new fruit fruit. Yea, a new meat for a new day. Let us feast upon unfamiliar savor!

            A troupe of Actors, all of them with the same appearance as Atamo Artificieri, rush out onto the stage bearing baskets of tropical fruits. They toss the fruits out into the crowd on the floor of the theatre, the floor now lit with bright light. The crowd are all men, black-haired, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, and with erect phalluses. They greedily eat the fruit. The people in the balcony, still in the dark, jape and jeer and toss rotten tomatoes, and other things more objectionable down upon the scene.


Adam Maker slipped quietly away into a universe in which his car crash had been accomplished with his own car and had actually been an accident unrelated to alcohol, and in which the crash had done him little serious damage. He arose from his hospital bed, gingerly dressed himself. Richard was asleep in a chair in front of the window. Adam kissed him very lightly on the forehead, breathed “Goodbye”, and disappeared into the universe of his own making and lived a life.






THE RUNEMASTER’S EMPERY

AN
I am you, and you are me, and we are three-in-one.
                                                                                         
TWA, DUO
I am large, and you are small, and we are all.
I signify—only me: me is we, the royal We.

THRI, TRES, TATU
I inhale the heights and you plumb the depths.
We spelunk the heavens; we exalt the hells;
We unwind insoluble purgatorial mazes.

FEOR, QUATTUOR, NNE, SI
I fret to fathom what you do not fathom.
You labor to do whatever it is you do.
The mind-sweat work is never complete.
The soul-blood work is done, was ages done.

FIF, QUINQUE, TANO, WU, KHAMSA
My unfettered ego draws wise designs.
Your clinging chains live droning power.
In concert we are the thrumming machine,
The producer, the production, the product,
The seller, the buyer, and the consumer.

SIX, SEX, SITA, LIU, SITTA, SHESH
You crush the very bones of the earth.
I grind upon the bones of long contention.
You hew trees, grass, grain, and flesh.
I cleave veils of sorrows, quaff tankards of joy.
We are one and the same in alien eyes,
Destroyer, destroyed, builder, and built.

SEFEN, SEPTEM, SABA, QI, SAB’A, SHEVA, YEDI
I am time, and you are time, and we are times.
You are stars, and I am stars, and we are stars.
I am stone, and you are stone, and we are stones.
You are sea, and I am sea, and we are seas.
I am wind, and you are wind, and we are winds.
You are flame, and I am flame, and we are flames.
And we are inflamed, and we are unflamed.

EOHT, OCTO, NANE, BA, THAMANIA, SHMONE, SEKIZ, ASTAU
I am shrunk down, and you are puffed up.
The swollen giant, relieved of his pain,
Transfers to you his midnight malady,
And you, me, and us are linked and primed
With a fractious, jostling, whirring togetherness
Of self-aware, unanimous, and multifarious
Mellifluous, transfluent, omnichordant discomfiture
And tribute to my over-heroic self-esteem.

NIGON, NOVEM, TISA, JIU, TISS’A, TEISHA, DOKUZ, NAUA, SONELA
Me who is you uplifts in immoderate pride,
A titan of overwhelming verbal concatenation.
You who is me swells with misapprehended joy,
A dwarf of mechanistic, emotional, complexity.
We who is all gums the works with biotic fever,
And make the works work with reasonable fervor.
You, me, and we are the fuel of the dynamic turbine
And feed the universe into the engine—and feed the universe.
Through the colossal engine of you: tiny I: moderate, royal All.




THE PATH TO THE GUEST HOUSE

“As to the mountain man, I ask: “What was Rendezvous all about?” It was a time to cement good relations—and often to fight out differences—between the mountain man and other mountain men, and between the mountain man and the Native Americans. It was a time to trade furs for supplies. And it was a time during which the mountain man might get access to a Native American woman who could give him the “creature comforts” he couldn’t get any other way. No mountain man was totally free. He had a support system just like his Eastern brethren. Without the aid of others, he would die.
“As to the cowboy—whoa, what a myth!”—Innen Younger

It was a beautiful room in a house of untold beauties. There was really no more apt way to describe this amazing room. The chamber was very large and supported by only one great column in the shape of a spreading oak. There were windows of various shapes and tints, each looking out upon a most spectacular view—of a garden, of a grove, of a fountain, or even of another equally beautiful part of the house. There were statues, some of men and women, some of beasts, some of lovely trees. There were chairs and divans and tables, and a shapely stone fireplace lit with a beckoning fire.
People sat comfortably upon some of the chairs and divans, sipping drinks from tall glasses shaped like pitcher plants and nibbling cookies from silver platters shaped like lily pads. Six women and four men in various stages of life sat in the great room as two children wrestled in the floor. Watching over it all, from a position near the great pillar, was a tall man, well-muscled and lightly tanned, and with flowing, raven hair. A smile was on his face, and his grey eyes glittered as he watched the children.
Servants came in from one of the three sets of double doors and set trays down on the great walnut table near the south wall. The smell of roasted meats and vegetables, and new wine, and breads laden with honey filled up the great chamber. A small glass bell tinkled, and the people gathered at the table, the tall man seating himself in the high-backed chair at the east end of the table. As he sat down, an old man with a long, white beard came in, leaning heavily upon a staff of twisted wood, and he sat down at the west end of the table.
The gathering took a sip of their wine, and then stood up as one and faced toward the setting sun as its red rays came through the trees outside and ran across the room. It was only a few minutes, and then the sun disappeared behind the tall mountains. “The Sun has blessed us, and now She goes to Her rest,” said the tall man. “As She refreshes Herself, let us now refresh ourselves.” The lamps along the walls seemed to spring on all by themselves, and everyone sat down and ate.
Though it was eaten in silence, save for the occasional slurp or clack of utensils and a request that this or that bowl or platter or ewer be passed along, the meal was joyous, for the food and drink were exquisite, and they were eaten and drunk in the company of friends. At the end of their repast they went back to the chairs and couches on the other side of the room. The old man with the great beard sat on the shelf near the fireplace and lit up a long pipe and smoked it.
The tall man did not seat himself, but came and stood before his guests in front of a large wall map on which his house was shown in red ink just west of a chain of high mountains. “I am so glad you all chose to make the long journey,” he said. “To have made such a journey, with only a little help, and false signposts everywhere, was indeed a mighty feat.”
Some of the guests smiled up at him, and some were clearly puzzled.
“We have had a pleasant time together, and a merry meal,” said the tall man, “but now I must ask a question of you all that may be less than pleasant.”
The smiles faded, and the puzzled countenances darkened.
The tall man smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry, but this is a question that must be asked, for the answer will serve to guide us in guiding you when you decide to move on.”
“Do we have to go away?” asked the girl-child. “We love it here, Mr. Starfield.”
“No, you never have to leave this House unless you wish to, Lila,” said the tall man. “But our studies show that, sooner or later, everyone, however given to ease and pleasure, will have as much rest and recuperation as she can stand. Everyone, soon or late, will feel compelled to move out. For that reason, we have built the Guest House on the other side of the Valley nigh the river that leads Outside.”
“But we came from Outside,” said Mrs. Miller. “We took great pains to come into the Hidden Valley.”
“I know it,” said Mr. Starfield. “But your minds will be put at ease presently when I have asked the Question, and you have given the Answer to your satisfaction.”
He paused and surveyed the faces that awaited his mysterious Question. This was not a place conducive to impatience. Such was not his concern here, and he was not delaying for dramatic effect. Rather, he was always reluctant to ask this question of all of the travelers who passed in and out of his doors. There had been so many people on their way from There to There, Here to Here, Here to There, and There to Here. Here all fears were allayed, but fears could not be removed altogether with only rest and good cheer. Even here anxieties could be summoned forth, and must be summoned and seen and greeted and put finally to their rest if folk were to pass on in peace. And no matter their love of ease and safety, all people wished to move on. Within so much concentrated satisfaction the seeds of dissatisfaction remained and could not be forever contained. No matter how much, there is always Something More.
“Well,” he said at last, “I must ask It. I am so pleased you have all accepted the Invitation. I am so pleased the long road did not prove too difficult. But there are more roads to travel, and when you have rested sufficiently, you will desire to tread these roads. It is my life to be a healer and a guide, and in order to guide you as well as I may, I need the Answer to this one Question: why did you accept the Invitation?”
The Response was the same as it has always been. First, there was uncomfortable silence. Then there was hubbub that ranged from it being a very unnecessary question to it being unfair to expect folks to know the Where, the How, and the Why of life. Mrs. Miller exclaimed: “How can you expect us to remember that many Whys?” Of course, no one had asked for the Where, or the How, but the easiest question to answer seemed to be Where, and folks always had their own beliefs about How, but Why always seemed to be a matter of utmost conjecture, conjecture of the most private and personal sort. Why was a matter revealed only to lovers and other confessors, and only in times of the greatest stress. It seemed so utterly wrong to disturb all this ease and certainty by rousing up such matters of uttermost chaos.
Bobby Linebrink was sitting on the floor playing blocks with little Lila Gaspari, apparently oblivious to the vexing Question. But when he had built up a twelve-block tower and Lila had knocked it over with a one-block bulldozer, he looked up and said, without any trace of sadness or rancor: “I had to follow my dad. He said he was coming to the Hidden Valley and that I’d follow him when I was ready. When the garbage truck came, I fell down, and I knew I was ready.”
“Yeah,” agreed Lila. “When I was little, Aunt Mini told me she was so tired that she had to go far away and rest for a very long time. I asked her where she was going and if I could come see her when she got rested up. She said where she was going was so hard to find that she didn’t know if she could find it herself. I told here sh would get there okay and that I would give her a few days to get there and rest up, then I’d come and see her. She said I should wait a few years and then see if I still wanted to come, and I said ‘Okay’. But a little while after she left, I got tired, too. All the street signs changed and told me how to get here, so I came. I want to see Aunt Mini, and I’m sure she’s here. I’ve been polite like I was told, but I miss Aunt Mini. When do I get to see her?”
“She’s on the path to the Guest House,” said Mr. Starfield. “She may still be on the path. I will take you out tomorrow to look for her.”
Lila smiled and then shifted here attention back to the blocks.
“What about my dad?” asked Bobby Linebrink.
“Your father is still here in the Main House, waiting,” said Mr. Starfield. “He is not yet ready to try the path to the Guest House. But he has visited you while you slept. I asked him not to come to you while you were awake because I want you to choose your own path. Maybe love for you will cause him to come with you on your next journey. We shall see.”
“I don’t understand,” said Bobby. “I want to see him now. I don’t want to go on another journey. I want to stay here with my dad.” Bobby put aside the blocks he was stacking, and he got up, hands stiff at his sides, and demanded: “I want to see Dad!”
“See,” said Mr. Starfield, “you have chosen a way for yourself. You and your father shall have a merry meeting. I shall bring him to your room this very evening.”
After Bobby had settled himself again, and had begun to play again with Lila, Mrs. Miller asked, “That was a bit cruel, don’t you think, agreeing to take Lila to see her aunt, but making Bobby get all riled up before agreeing to take him to see his dad?”
“It would seem so,” said Mr. Starfield, “but Philemina Miniver, Lila’s aunt, is on a long and difficult path, and if I don’t take Lila to see her very soon, the two may never see one another again. While I would prefer that Philemina not influence the way Lila chooses to go from here, I could not be so cruel, as you might put it, as to keep them apart for all eternity and not allow them even to say what might be their last ‘goodbyes’ forever.
“But Bobby’s father is still here, and if I have judged rightly, he would not have made ready to move on until he knew what his son would do. It is not easy to get folk ready for the next journey when they and their loved ones are in the House together. This can be a matter of some sadness, for it will delay them. But it is not for me to order the arrivals and departures. It is for me to welcome weary travelers and provide them with all possible hospitality, and to help them prepare themselves for whatever comes next.”
Except for the little noises of the children, who were being studiously quiet in their play among the adults, there was another period of silence. It was then that the men and women gathered in the chamber noticed the sweet apple smell of the smoke from the pipe of the old, bearded man. He still sat silent on the broad shelf of the fireplace, legs out and one crossed over the other, his eyes disfocused as he sucked absently at his pipe.
It was during the silence that Mr. Fredricks, who had inadvertently sat himself in the chair nearest the fireplace, turned his attention to this old man. The other adults had sunk into themselves to think on the Question, and even Eli Starfield seemed to have gone elsewhere in his mind—and who knew how old he was and how many places and times he might be able to visit? But Samuel Fredricks was suddenly aware of that strange old man (who smoked a pipe any more? who used a staff as a crutch any more?), as if there had been a veil on his perception of this man, and that veil had now, for whatever reason, been unceremoniously removed.
“Well,” said Mr. Starfield softly, jarring Sam Fredricks out of his reverie as if he’d slapped him with a brick, “it seems best that we let be for the evening. We all have much considering to do, and I must take Bobby to his father.”
The others didn’t seem to be so struck by Mr. Starfield’s dismissal of the group, and they said their “good evenings” and drifted away. Eli Starfield guided the children out of the Hall. As Mr. Starfield and the little ones left, the lamps went out. But the bearded, old man remained. Sam remained also, musing on his strange reactions to this utterly pleasant place.
Now that they were alone in the room lit from the east by bright silver moonlight and from the fire in the great hearth, shadows wavering and leaping among the furnishings and the statues, and flitting across the great, central oak, the old man turned his attention to Sam. His eyes never leaving Sam’s seated form, the old man, leaning on his staff, arose and stretched, his ancient hips and shoulders cracking. “Oh, oh,” he said, smiling and grimacing at the same time. “Ah, there we go.”
Sam, eyes glittering in the firelight, looked up at the old man, limned as he was in the moonlight. “Hmm,” said Sam, “but where do we go? We are Here, but this seems to be a way station. What lies Beyond? Am I just going from station to station? Is there a final destination? Does the journey ever end, or is there only and ever The Journey?”
The old man studied Sam for a while, a little crook of a smile on his face. He replied, “I guess you know well enough the answers to these questions, Sam. But where do you think you are? You, of all the travelers who came into this room today, ought to know precisely where you are.”
“How do you mean?” Sam asked. “I’ve never been to this place before?”
“You haven’t!?” cried the old man. “Great elephants! Think on it! Open your mind and search?”
Sam’s eyes went wide, and then they narrowed. “What you suggest is ridiculous,” said Sam. “I don’t know why you’ve singled me out to play this joke on.”
“So, I seem like I’m joking, do I?” responded the old man. He lifted his staff a few inches off the floor, and a golden light grew from the upper end of it to unendurable brilliance.
Sam shielded his eyes and breathed: “Books are books, and real is real.”
“Nonsense!” said the old man. “I am Elvin Staffman! And, did you not recognize Eli Starfield? Did you not recognize this place as the Welcoming House of the West?”
“Oh, please!” drawled Sam. “I read stories, and I write stories. This is my life!”
“You are Story,” responded Mr. Staffman.
“Whatever,” said Sam. “That’s at best an aphorism, at worst a platitude, and most likely an inept metaphor, Mr. Staffman. But really, what are you playing at?”
The staff went dark again. “Hmm, well, gracious!” said Mr. Staffman. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say to convince you. I suppose you think my staff is only a battery-operated contrivance, or perhaps the resulting operations of something added to your wine.”
Sam said, “My thoughts on the matter run along those lines.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Staffman, “you are an author who does not subscribe to his own penmanship, I see. These things you say are ideas alone. Those scribblings about stories being ‘the doors and windows that let onto other worlds’ are no more than scribblings, things for your mind to turn in all directions to examine.”
“Look,” said Sam. “I’m a storyteller, or I thought I was. Stories, even when they’re true, are fantasies. At most, they represent reality as the author sees it. At least, they’re silly whimsies. Those stories you claim to have been in were only popular fantasies. They represented a world people wished were real and true. But fantasies are things of the mind, and you and Mr. ‘Starfield’ are things of the flesh—unless this is the realest and the longest dream I’ve ever had.”
“I see why you gave it up,” said Mr. Staffman. “You are gifted at using words, Sam Fredricks, but you don’t really understand Story: you don’t really believe. But what does it matter whether those things you experience are artifacts of your mind or the proceeds of that which you deem The Real? Whatever you believe you are experiencing, it is you who are experiencing it, you who are responding to it. What you do reveals who you are. So, who are you? Who have I come so far and endured so many trials to meet and to guide? Or, who has your mind created to come to you, in this place, offering to advise you on the choice of the roads that surround you?”
“Or, who has been constructed to come to me and cloud my mind?” asked Sam Fredricks.
“Really?” responded Mr. Staffman. “You are confronted with uncomfortable realities, or discomfiting ideas. Will you retreat into paranoia? Who are you, Sam Fredricks, when you are alone in the darkness and the cold, naked, and with no tools to aid you?”
Sam stood up, fists clenched at his sides, and stared into the old man’s eyes for several minutes. At last, he sighed, sat back down, and finished his (possibly tainted) wine. “All right,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, “what advice do you have for me, Mr. Staffman?”
“First, and possibly less important,” replied Mr. Staffman, “call me Elvin. Staffman describes somewhat of my appearance. I want to be your friend, if I can, but if we must be adversaries, let us be friendly ones.”
Sam looked up, smiling with closed mouth, and said, “Okay, Elvin. Let’s be friends, even if you are some paranoid fantasy of mine—or of someone else’s creation.”
“Well, Sam,” said Elvin, “that brings me to my second, and likely more important piece of advice: know yourself. If you have truly come to know yourself, you will know how you will respond, even to the worst evil or the most powerful delusion. It isn’t the thing you respond to that is meaningful, but rather your response that is meaningful.”
“Another platitude, Elvin?” asked Sam.
“If you see that statement as a platitude,” said Elvin, “you are dismissing the idea because you don’t really understand it, which is because you don’t feel it. You still think you can control the things and the events in the world around you—at least sufficiently for your own purposes. You rely on control of your world to control yourself. If the world is out of kilter, you are out of sorts.”
“So you think I’ve come to the house of Eli Starfield to learn this lesson?” asked Sam.
“I imagine so,” said Elvin. “And if I’m a construction generated by or in your mind, I’m a benign one. This is a lesson it’s good for anyone to learn.”
Sam rubbed his face and then got up, picked up his glass, and went to the great table to get a refill. As he was pouring, he asked, “Do you think this is why I gave up on telling stories?”
“Only you can answer that,” said Elvin. “But I must issue you another platitude, if you will. I prefer aphorism, and here it is: the strong roots uphold the tree.”
“Ugh” said Sam, taking a deep draught of wine.
As Sam decanted yet more wine, Elvin said, “You are dismissive of aphorisms because you don’t feel capable of living them, and you have decided no one really lives them, or ever did. People will tell you that these wise old sayings are foolish, and that they do not apply to the real world. But I tell you that the reason these sayings have survived from ancient times is because they are wise. It seems much easier to say that the people of older ages of the world were stupid than to live with wisdom in the face of so many hard trials and temptations.”
“Argh!” said Sam. “I think I’ve had more wine than is good for me, Elvin. If you survive my dreams, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Very well,” said Elvin, laughing heartily. “I fully intend to survive your night!”

Elvin’s laughter, deep and rich, full of irrepressible merriment, echoed though Sam’s dreams. Sam rarely could recall having dreamt at all, and he could count on one hand the number of dreams so vivid that he could recount any of the details. But he had several dreams this night, one of which he knew would stay with him forever. At the end of this one he awoke and set it down on paper, a thing he had been unable to do since he dropped the pen at the end of The Last Stand of Filbert Figgins. He had expected to find Elvin Staffman lounging by the fire when he awoke, but he was as alone now as he had been among the denizens of the alleys of Wolverton after his wife had left his hacked-out self.
It was indeed a powerful dream, though not perhaps the strangest vision ever to occur in the world of randomly-juxtaposed ideations. It started with dream-Sam—that unidentified self that functions as the dream’s point of view—staring out into blackness filled with an unknown star field. The scene changed to become Conan seated upon the carved throne of Aquilonia—which he knew was him looking upon himself. And now he was gazing out from his throne into his Great Hall of black marble columns, the story of the rise of Conan told in colored friezes on the white walls, warriors and demon-gods dancing in the torchlight. When he twitched, servants ran hither and thither. When he groaned, armies marched forth and gangs of slaves laid the world’s riches at his sandaled feet. Gods, he was bored!
Suddenly, he looked down and found that his throne sat atop a mountain of bones. A bare skull with eyes was grinning up at him. The skull began to levitate out of the pile, still with it’s gaze locked to Conan-Sam’s gaze. It sprouted wispy blue flames as it backed away and lowered itself to a position about five feet from the white marble floor caked with grey bone dust. The skull began to laugh—with a familiar laugh—and its ghostly fire took the form of Elvin Staffman. The dream ended in darkness accompanied by hearty, echoing laughter, and screams of agony, and shrieks of terror.
It was hard to get back to sleep, even after exorcising the demons by submitting and committing them to pen and paper. But Sam was abed in the Welcoming House of the West, and calm and sleep returned. There were more dreams, but of a more pleasant sort.
When he arose, Sam knew he had missed breakfast. He dressed and went into the Great Hall, where he found bread, butter, a tiny wheel of cheese, a tumbler of wine, and a card with his name on it. The note said: “When you have finished, please come out to the East Garden. Eli Starfield.”
Sam was hungry. Apparently, a heavy night’s dreaming—or nightmaring—was hungry, thirsty work.  Though they had grown fond of one another in the weeks they had spent at Mr. Starfield’s House, Sam felt no rush to get to the Garden and see his companions, who he assumed would be there also. So, he sat himself down and nibbled and sipped and thought.
Thinking, it seemed, was also hungry work. Before he was finished it was a bit after noon, and though he had not noticed, a thoughtful servant had brought more bread, cheese, and wine. He had probably missed more goings-on than that—or perhaps non-goings-on—such as the fact that none of his companion group had come in from the Garden for lunch.
It wasn’t to be wondered at, of course, since a nightmare such as the one last night was of the sort that required the reassessment of a life—or more running away from a life. Sam Fredricks was the kind of human being who both would not back down and would run away, sometimes at the same time.
His autobiographical memory was exceedingly spotty and vague. He could not clearly recall even recent events. If asked what he had eaten for breakfast, he often could not remember having eaten it, much less what it consisted of—and he might feel obliged to make up an answer. All that personal lumber was lying, milled and unmilled, in a tumble in various parts of his mind, waiting for someone to attend it and make something out of it.
And he could make something out of it—when he was under the delusion that he made was wonderful, and that it really mattered. Goblins and Gimbals had been his well-received debut novel. Maulicette the Magnificent & Other Maunderings had put him on the literary map. And the nine books in the Filbert Figgins series had for three years outsold Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings combined (not at their height of popularity, mind, but still, not bad at all). But that had been all he had in him, it turned out. Since the middle of book six, Filbert Figgins and the Fentworth Frog-Monsters, doubts had sprouted (or, rather, had come to the fore out of some deeply-buried places in his psyche). Unformed, unnamed, uncategorizeable thoughts came to nag at every pen stroke. He wrote everything longhand, sure that this made him a real writer. But by the beginning of The Last Stand of Filbert Figgins, he felt solidly like an abject fraud. It took him four years to write that finishing novel, his bloodthirsty publisher at him at least twice a day at the end of the effort.  That was hard on him, but the worst part of the ordeal was his inability to give form and hue to those nagging thoughts, as any writer worth his salt should have been able to do in the nine years since he began to feel them gnawing at him.
But, really, that wasn’t the absolute worst part of those years. Rather, it was his wife’s silent endurance. Brenda waited in silence, tending his needs as doubts at him alive. She soothed him and saw to his physical upkeep—all without a cross word or so much as a grimace—until she had taken all of it—the insomnia, the apathy, the self-loathing—that she could take. She left in dignity—her own, since she could not provide him with any. And, without her, he refused to attend the bills, although his residuals, even reduced by alimony, were far more than sufficient to modest needs. He refused to write, or to think seriously, or to care for his sanitary needs; he simply faded out of his house and into alleys and soup kitchens. His residuals went to the bank, and a court order gave Brenda receivership of them, since he was presumed incompetent or deceased. And without even Brenda’s mute presence to prop him up…
Sam could not for his life recall how he had progressed from huddling in a coat in a Wolverton alley to the Welcoming House of the West. Of course, this House was an impossibility, as were its proprietor Eli Starfield, and his guest Elvin Staffman—all of them fictions from the fantasy series The Last of the Elder Wars. He could conclude that his companions in the East Garden were equally fictitious, or that they had also been duped for some mysterious reason.
So now, setting aside the past, since its consequences couldn’t yet be resolved, there seemed to be only two main lines of reasoning to pursue. It seemed pointless at present to pursue the paranoid path. If he was being psychically manipulated in some fashion, his manipulators were certainly playing a long game. If this was a reprise of “36 Hours” and Sam was Major Pike, then Eli Starfield was Major Gerber, and Elvin was a less-desirable Anna Hedler. Major Gerber/Eli Starfield would eventually trick Sam/Major Pike into giving up the Normandy landing location/whatever information or action was desired of Sam. But that was a very overwrought idea, and very paranoid, and it contained no positive proofs and a very big plot hole: he had no information even remotely as important, from any sane point of view, as the D-Day landing information. And if, beyond credibility, a subterfuge with major input of time and resources turned out to be the truth—well, he’d just have to play along until he could find a means of escape, or until his manipulators showed their true colors.
Thus, the best way to proceed was to treat this experience, however ludicrous it seemed to do so, as if it were real. Elvin Staffman had suggested as much. Sam took a last drink of wine and went out of the House.
The sky was clear, and the yard was brightly lit. The smell of camellias, snapdragons, and hackberry blossoms wafted toward him on the breeze out of the East Garden. As he walked on the broad flags and approached the Garden, a haze came into the air. The haze rapidly became mist, and the fog became fog, and the sun became totally obscured. It was not a clammy fog, nor a particularly warm fog, and so it seemed preternatural.
Sam’s pace slowed as alarm bells clanged in his head and his skin began to bead with cold sweat. He could barely see the flagstone walk, and his legs wobbled. He nearly toppled several times but stubbornly drove on.
Eventually, he broke out of the fog back into the sunlight—which had now turned red as the Sun lay Herself down into the great cleft of the Upper Pass in the ragged mountains behind him. The flowers, the bushes, the trees, the water fountain, and the people in the Garden thus all appeared tainted with blood—at least to Sam’s current state. He recoiled and landed heavily on a stone bench, breathing hard.
When he calmed himself, he found Audrey Miller mopping his head with a damp cloth. All eyes were on him, but not all the members of the group were present. Aside from Mrs. Miller, Ms. Jut Keung Min, Ms. Sheila McKean, Mr. Gamutra Ranibandar, and Mr. Wallace Czabec were in the Garden, as was Eli Starfield.
“Where are the others?” Sam breathed.
“Well,” said Mrs. Miller, “Bobby’s probably in the House. Lila’s gone off with her aunt. Samantha, Peswar, Limmun, and Melia made their choice of paths earlier. The rest of us have been concerned for you, and we have stayed on, hoping you’d arrive before the day was out.” She smiled and handed him the wet cloth. “You’ve made it just in the nick of time.”
As she said these words, the sun’s last rays disappeared and night, with a few early stars, appeared suddenly, as it was wont to do so close to high mountains. When the moon came up in the east, the red Garden was erased from Sam’s mind as everything tinged with silver.
At last Mrs. Miller said, “We are fond of you, Sam. But we are eager to pursue our chosen paths. We have been your friends and hope to see you again somewhere, some day. But we don’t think we can help you to make your choice. And we don’t think we should. So, goodbye.” She leaned in and kissed his forehead, and then she turned and walked out of the Garden on the eastern side—and faded away.
The others did not seem at all disconnected. They watched her go, and then they turned back to Sam, approached one by one, said goodbye, shook his hand, and departed the same way as Audrey Miller.
Eli Starfield sat down on a bench next to the small bronze fountain at the center of the Garden. Now Sam could hear the night birds and the patter of the silver water. A light breeze picked up, and he began to feel a bit chill as the sweat dried away from his skin.
Sam felt more than a little selfishly ridiculous, having burst suddenly, sweatily, and breathlessly into the Garden. to be greeted so sweetly by companions who had waited for him most of the day. His semi-paranoia felt ridiculous: this thing was really happening. No magician of the world he knew could produce time distortions, and no dream he had ever heard of could produce such detail, for so long, and so seamlessly. But really, the most ridiculous thing was that it mattered to him whether it was all really real or not. Elvin, whether he was a real man with independent life or a projection of Sam’s mind, was right. Sam now had the answer to who has was when he was all along and with nothing to aid him, and he didn’t care much for the answer. He was a dumb, panicky animal, and he should have been a human.
Eli motioned to him, and he got up and went to the fountain. “Sit here, please,” said Eli, patting a place on the bench.
Sam seemed to have no further will left, so he complied.
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” said Eli, as if he had read Sam’s mind.
“Mr. Starfield,” said Sam, “do you ever feel like a prisoner in your own life? And, do you feel you were rightly or wrongly convicted? And, do you feel the sentence was fair?”
Eli studied Sam hard for long moments before responding. He said, “I take it you are asking if I ever feel I’m in a situation not of my own making and that I have no power to alter things to my benefit.”
“You could put it that way, I suppose,” said Sam. “Of course, you’re leaving out the bits about punishment and fairness.”
Eli smiled, and for a moment it was like morning had broken through the night. “We’ll take on thing at a time,” he said.
“Okay,” Sam said hesitantly.
“To believe you are imprisoned in life,” said Eli, “you’d have to believe in fate, I think—and I do. You know, my people are bound to fate until the end of the world. All that we do now, have done, or ever will do was and is known, and was known from the Beginning.”
“Then,” responded Sam, “you know what I mean.”
“If you mean I feel what you feel, I would have to say ‘no’,” said Eli. “You see, the outcome of every situation I’m in may be foreseen and foretold—that is, God knows—but each decision I make is my own. But God knows, and fate has thus already been adjusted to account for me. I am not, therefore, imprisoned, although the situations to which I must respond have been placed in time and space so that I must respond to them.”
“Hmm,” said Sam, “that’s a cold, remote, abstract way of thinking about it. Your words don’t respond to my feelings. I am, or was, a writer, Mr. Starfield. I have to tell stories. Stories are how I make sense of things.”
“Well,” said Eli, “—and I wish you’d call me Eli—you have read somewhat of my story. Mr. Delgan wrote that in order to speak to you of your fate, and life, and death, and love, and hate, and all such things that make up the human world. For five-thousand six-hundred thirty-two years I have lived my story, Sam. I have seen joy, and I have been joyous. I have witnessed pain, and I have borne pain. I have watched lovers, and I have been a lover—and I have lost my lover, the love of my life. I am a proud father, and I have been a proud son. What story do you wish? I have so many of them.”
Sam did not reply.
“Maybe you should tell me a story,” said Eli. “Tell me a story to help me understand your problem. Perhaps Immortals need tales to see the troubles of Mortals. By brother was a Mortal, but I lost him a very long time ago.”
“I suspect you know all my stories—Eli,” said Sam. “What can I tell you that you don’t already know? I guess everybody feels like they’re in charge of their own choices. Even you have said you felt like that. I feel it, too. But ever since I can remember, a doubt has been growing on me. I’ve always wanted to tell stories, but why? I’m trying to explain it all, right?—as much to myself as to anyone else.
“But why do I feel the need to explain it all? I suppose because I can’t reconcile that free will everyone says I have with the things going on in and around me, over which I seem to have so little control.”
Eli turned and held two glasses up to the spating water, and when they were filled, he handed one to Sam. Eli took a long draught and then re-filled his glass. The moonlight limned Eli’s hair, brow, and shoulders in sparkling silver, and just on the edges of perception, Sam thought he could discern a silvery glow growing within Eli’s body, coursing and pulsing.
It took a bit for Sam to adjust to the marvel he was seeing, and he sat staring, his own glass unheeded in his hand. But, at last, his gnawing suspicion returned. “Are you trying to drug me?” he said.
Eli smiled and replied, ”If water is a drug, then, ‘yes’. But really, ‘no’. It is only water flowing clean and vigorous from the mountains into the East Garden.”
Sam sniffed at his glass, and it smelled like—nothing, that is, like water. And then he recalled his resolve to go with the flow of things, and, sipping at first, then, not having realized his thirst, gulping. The wine of the House had been very refreshing, but this simple, clean water restored him like nothing he had ever drunk. It felt so cool in the throat and the belly, and the coolness spread through his body and seemed to exude into the air around him. It was not a deadly or enervating coolness, but a clarifying coolness, and everything, from all that he saw, heard, and smelt around him to the processes within him became crisp and clean, noted, studied, and accepted with joy and without grievance.
“Like all people,” Eli said after a few moments, “you crave meaning. This water has meaning, which is to be water. The fountain has a meaning, which is to be a fountain. Each tree, each flower, each herb, each bird, each mouse, and each cricket in this Garden is itself and has its own meaning. Inasmuch as I put a meaning upon these things, it is my meaning, and it is best if my meaning is in harmony with all other meanings.
“But the meaning you want to know is your own. Yet, you seek it everywhere else. Your family supplied you with meaning. Your writing manufactured your meaning. But some part of you has always known that these outer meanings have left you hollow, and you want to be filled.
“Maybe you are thinking that God knows the meaning. He made all the meanings, after all. That seems to me quite likely, but, whatever you mean to God, it seems also likely that He also wishes for you to find your own meaning. Otherwise, He could have made your purpose and His feelings about your purpose unmistakably clear to you.”
“Hmph!” said Sam. “Maybe that seems obvious to you, but not to me. It seems that you’re assuming God is benign, or at least not capricious or malicious. But in the world I come from, this is a fact not in evidence. Maybe the bad doesn’t outweigh the good—or, rather, the good and the neutral combined—but there’s still plenty of bad. If I can’t fill myself with God, and I can’t fill myself with my loved ones and my writing, what is there? What is the Me that’s lurking in the dark hollows? What is my soul?”
Eli frowned for a moment, the silver fading from him. But then he smiled and looked up, and said: “That’s the biggest question of all of our little lives. I cannot give you the answer to that question, since it would be my answer and not yours. In the end, taking up my answer could not satisfy you. I can only tell you that I am Eli Starfield, and with this I am content. I do what I feel is best to do, in my own way and in my own time. I use my powers to observe and to think on where harmony with my world lies. To ask for more will only breed discord between myself and my world.
“You must decide what, in his heart of hearts, Sam Fredricks wishes. You must discern whether this desire will bring harmony and joy, or whether it will make disharmony and sorrow. The one way leads you rightly, and the other leads you wrongly. The road you travel may never end, but if you are on the right road, your joy will always increase. And you can always change the road you’re on.
“That is why you are here. My House welcomes you and will keep you until you learn whether you wish to seek harmony or disharmony. When you are ready, you will take the path out of the Garden that best suits you. I can tell you that before the Sun rises, you will have made your choice and will be on your way.”
“It sounds like you’re ready to leave me to my own thoughts,” said Sam. “May I ask you one question first?”
“Of course,” said Eli.
“What path did Elvin take?” asked Sam.
“He took the path to the Guest House,” said Eli. “It may be that you will see him if you go that way. But I cannot tell you if that is the path of harmony for you.”
“Still,” said Sam, “I want to see him. All the time as I wrote my stories, he has been my guidepost. I read Elvin the Eldritch when I was very young. My mother said I was precocious, and I knew what that meant. I was very proud to be precocious, and I associated it with my knowledge and love of Elvin Staffman.”
“You will find harmony where you look for it,” said Eli Starfield, smiling and putting his hand on Sam’s shoulder. He then turned and left by the westward path toward his House. As he disappeared from the Garden, the Sun rose at his back.
Trying his best to overlook the strange way space and time worked in the Hidden Valley, Sam decided he might as well leave the Garden by the same way the others of his group had done. It seemed certain to Sam that Eli Starfield believed there would be more information to work on than he already had. And it seemed logic had nothing further to offer him. From here, he would have only his emotions—his soul?—to go on. He might as well go: he had no idea if his emotions could ever prepare him for whatever choices lay beyond the Garden on the path to the Guest House.
The passage out of the Garden was different from the passage in. There was no fog, no disorientation: it was simply as if a door opened as he approached, and closed after he went through. When he looked back, he saw no Garden and no House, only a simple gravel path winding among stones and trees alongside a noisy stream. The air smelled of verdant life, strong with wildflowers and pine resin, and what he could see of the sky was clear blue. There was only the one navigable path running roughly west and east. There were birds and squirrels, but no animal large enough to make a trail a man could walk.
Sam had walked the path eastward for a while when he felt something brush against his left side. The tree-branches were on his right, and there was nothing on his left, the stream-side, that he could have brushed against. Disconcerted, he stood staring at the light play upon the leaves and upon the rushing water, and the water-noise seemed to grow. It happened again—and he could see nothing that could have brushed him. Twice more it happened, and then fear took hold of him, forcing him to take his best walking pace, wide-eyed and with cold hands, eastward.
After an hour or so, Sam came to a tree-lined glade with a rough circle of brilliant sunshine beaming into its center. He halted and stared into the brightness. and as he watched, it seemed to him that he could see the vague outlines of people passing now and again, from west to east, through the illumination. A shiver ran down his spine. “I’m in a land of ghosts,” Sam said quietly.
Another voice said, “For the Stranger, any land is a land of ghosts.”
Sam gave a start and nearly turned and fled. He might have done, but he now saw a stone bench nestled among the bushes near the stream. On that bench was seated a hooded figure in a dirty white robe. This figure was strangely reassuring, an apparently living person in this realm of undeath.
As if drawn by an invisible cord, he moved with staccato steps toward the stone bench and its mysterious occupant.
“Please, Stranger,” said the hooded figure, “sit next to me. Let us pass the time. The day is long, and it is as good to pass on late as it is soon.”
Sam sat, and for some reason—as if it were important to get this straight before proceeding—he perceived that the compulsion to come and sit had not originated from the figure on the bench, but from within himself. He should have been terrified, but, inch by inch, the thongs of fear that bound him were slipping away, leaving dragging welts that he was becoming increasingly sure would heal swiftly. All discomforts and pains were ephemeral, and the ephemerality to which his body was accustomed felt more and more like a delusion, a fantasy that the living mind constructs to hide itself from an existence that is overwhelmingly more alive.
“Tell me something,” said Sam. “Why can I see you and not them?” He pointed toward the faintly shimmering figures passing through the beam of light.
“Would it discomfort you to know that they can’t see you?” responded the hooded one.
“No,” said Sam, “I don’t suppose it would. So, I suppose it doesn’t. They can’t see me. I’m sure of it.”
“They are ephemeral,” said Hooded Figure, “and you are ephemeral. They can’t see each other, for they each tread their own path in this realm, even though they are all on the same Road.”
“I’m not sure what that tells me,” said Sam. “Are you saying you are not ephemeral? Can they see you as I can? Why aren’t they also gathered over here to receive your wisdom?”
Hooded Figure chuckled. “No, I am not ephemeral,” he said, “not serially ephemeral like you?”
“Serially ephemeral?” said Sam.
“Yes,” said Hooded Figure, “ephemeral over and over, living in the Middle World, again and again, until weariness of spirit drives you on to other Worlds.”
“You’re saying I’ve been alive before?” asked Sam. “Who are you? How do you know this? Who was I before? What am I now? Who will I be next time? Is this where all my doubts come from?”
“Your doubts come out of your search for meaning,” said Hooded Figure. “You will be whoever you will be. You are Sam Fredricks. You were whoever you were. I know this because knowing is my lot. Yes, you’ve been alive before. Do these simple answers soothe you, or do they discomfit you?”
“No, they don’t soothe me,” said Sam. “They still leave me wanting. I feel like if I could get just these answers, given in some way I can comprehend with my gut, my mind could come along for the ride, and my doubts would go away—or at least become tolerable.”
They sat in silence for a long while, watching the others passing into and out of the light, but at last Hooded Figure said.
“You were always here, from the beginning of the universe. You were always here in this bench, talking with me. You were always in that alley, making friends with the rats. You were always married to Brenda, and always estranged from Brenda. You were always a child, reading his favorite books, books that gave him meanings that shaped his life, meanings that he secretly doubted, that led him to write his own books, to marry his wife, and to end himself in a dark, dank, and cold alley. You are Ephemeral and Eternal. Those forty-eight and two-thirds years cannot ever be undone: they exist now, they always did exist, and they always will exist. You cannot ever be erased from time and space. Though you are here, and you shall go elsewhere, you are also there, in the time and place appointed to you. Wherever you go from here, you shall be in that new time and place also. So, you see, though your body died out of the life you remember, it also lives on in that life forever. It is you, and our time here is you, and the times before that which you do not recall are you, and the times after that you do not yet know are you. You may live a trillion lives, in a trillion guises, but these lives are all you. You can never be truly slain, though you experience all the joys and tortures that there are to experience. And all those ephemeral people that you have met, they can say the same. In that way, you are all one, though you are each unique in the path you take to your oneness.
“Me, I am Eternal. I can take any guise I desire, but I shall never be anyone but myself. I can never slough off, and every pleasure and every pang shall be ingrained and present in me forever. Though I cannot be slain in this body, in any guise I may take, and I shall never know what it is to find my end in an alley, I shall never truly heal the hurts done me, and I shall never lose the wonders to which I bear witness. You shall be renewed when you take on your new body, and your memories of the old shall sleep. All old things will become new again as you come upon them. Not so for me: I already know and always have known every moment. I have rehearsed these words that I speak to you since the moment I was created. I already know what I shall say to you each of the many times we will meet. I will never truly comprehend this life—these lives—you lead, but it has nonetheless been appointed to me to bring you this modicum of solace at this time.”
He arose and bowed before Sam. And then he reached up and threw back his hood—and it was Eli Staffman! And he reached into the bushes and retrieved his staff, and it lit up the glade like a tiny sun. Elvin laughed, and, after a moment of astonishment, Sam laughed. Together the made such an uproarious laughter than the earth seemed to tremble, and the trees and the bushes all shuddered. And, for a few moments, the people passing through stopped, came to shivering, shimmering visibility to Sam and to one another, and joined in the merriment.

“Are you now soothed?” asked Elvin. “Are your doubts at last put to rest? Can you go on?”
“Yes, Elvin.” answered Sam. “Any anyway, it’s time to let the others pass on.”
As if one command, the other travelers seemed to lose their substance and to resume their private journeys. Sam and Elvin followed suit, walking silently down the narrow path out of the glade, not minding as the others brushed invisibly by. It was a beautiful day, of course—once one became used to the idea of being dead-but-alive-forever and traveling amongst unknown numbers of others in the midst of this same experience. Sam wondered how many of them had their own Elvin Staffman helping them along in their understanding of their peculiar state.
After a while, Sam and Elvin came to a place where the path began to widen and then to divide into two paths. The path to the left was broader and paved with flags. It bent downward and then curved until it passed by an arched stone bridge over the noisy brook. Beyond the rolling foothills a river could be seen sparkling in the distance. All the other travelers that Sam could discern in the bright light were going that way.
The path to the right bent upward, and it was narrower, and in places was overgrown with grass and weeds, and blocked with fallen limbs and even whole trees. It was a darker path, and the trees were closer and older, There were strange, quiet noises coming from that direction, as if there were beasts of unguessable shapes and hues lurking.
Sam and Elvin stood where the path divided. Elvin did not turn his head, but Sam knew that Elvin was attending him intently. Sam said: “It’s quite a choice, isn’t it? But I suppose you know which way I’ll go. That path on the right goes to the Guest House, I’m sure. The path on the left goes to Outside. Outside is another life as a man, or a woman, or a goat, or a Xygnaxian, or something.
“The Guest House. I assume it’s a place of rest, from which I can explore the grounds without disturbing the Master of the Manor. But it wouldn’t do to live forever in the Guest House, would it?
“What then, when my welcome is outworn? Back to this spot, and then Outside? Or is there a Deeper Inside? Or a Beyond the Guest House? Or maybe a Cellar where I could at last be laid down like a wine that is to be aged until the right day, and opened and enjoyed?
“Well, we both know which way I have to go. I’m still a storyteller, and I imagine I always have been. Who wants to hear a story about a guy who took the easy way—and the way stayed easy? Let’s go.”
So, Sam and Elvin took the dark path and quickly disappeared behind a stand of immense thistles. Surely, they must have come to the Guest House and found the answers to all Sam’s questions—or else what the hell was the purpose of the story, anyway?




THE INEXPRESSIBLE EXPRESSIBLE

I’m in a pitiless parking lot again,
Ensconced in my faithful jalopy,
Open windows venting autumnal heat,
Dutifully, unhappily, waiting for a friend.
I hate, hate, hate, hate this lurid place!
A new, shiny car pulls in alongside,
Two pretty, young girls jumping inside,
Blasting a boy-star’s bubble gum song,
Through tinted windows sealed shut
To the agony of the world without.
No doubt, to them, dulcet melody;
Super-heated icepicks in my ears.

Thank powers invisible, it’s over!
Inside they trot, wiggling obliviously.
Outside I remain, middle-aged and shriveling,
Trying my level best to shrink and sink
So far within myself that no sensation can reach…
Argh! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!
Perhaps the rhythm will rumble on
And draw up Shai-hulud from the depths:
Should his sandy mouth take me, too, no regret.
Ah, well, no sandworm comes today.
Thanks ever so much for sharing!

Merciful sunset settles on my weary soul.
There is that, and yet no satisfaction
As benzene fumes wave the air, hypnotized,
Venomous cobras striking my nostrils
Here on the hideous, regimented tarmac,
Vapors seeping into my yearning soul.
If only the rampant breath of last Sunday
Would blow this fetid murk away…
But now I sense the sugary bond:
Sticky children touched my hands,
And the love/hate stick is still stuck,
Helping me cling to my filthy steering wheel.

And so it is every minute, of every hour,
Of every day, of every week, of
Every month, every year, every decade.
Every second is a millennial fatigue,
Ground under the uncaring spiked heels
Of inexorable genetic circumstance,
Trammeled by bondless bonds of
Seven billion delusive imaginings.


Now someone is at the drive-up window,
And I discover a strategic parking error:
A medicine of which I am now aware,
Painfully, needlessly, unavoidably aware,
Is dispensed with tinny questions
And annoyingly unheard answers.
And the bubbly girls and the pop song
Are back and giggly, blasting away;
The music is so sickly saccharine,
And they seem so blissfully stupid…
Where was I? Oh, yeah.
The enervating minutes of the proceedings;
Jotting my enervating effort at poetry.

I feel evil, hateful, spiteful,
Malicious, destructive, and murderous,
And otherwise full of hellish furies.
I feel equally like a huddling child,
Wishing it would all just go away.
And I feel like some religion’s
Patron Saint of Put-on Patience,
Bestowing my self-serving beneficence,
Noticeably tolerant of nonsense chaos,
While placidly contemplating continents,
And whirling planets, and wheeling stars,
And limitless voids, heavens, and hells.

My words are ramified by meaning.
My words are distilled for potency.
My syllables are strained for purity.
My verbs are bottled for longevity.
You unshelve them, open them up,
And drink them with bread and cheese.
They enter you and wind their way through,
And what nourishes you is sifted out,
And the leftovers inexorably excreted.
Peristalsis pushes the unwanted stuff
Around, down, and out into—plop!
Ever-ready waters wash that all away.
Digested stuff passes to your pumping heart
And whooshes on to your pulsing brain.
Indecipherable forces sort and sift
And make a garbled/ungarbled movie
And screen it for your mind’s eye.

My inner life is now your feature film.
I wrote the fantastic epic novel.
You converted it to your screenplay.
Possibly, the effort has inspired you—
But has the inexpressible been expressed?








EPISYLLOGISM

Bartholomew Bumble

...the golden words now melted away and all sensation ceased, leaving only a drifting, timeless, featureless darkness. BOOOOOM!!! There was a mote of indeterminate size and form, a mote that vaguely recognized its own existence. BOOOM!! The mote felt itself as a thing with limbs, a body, and pointless sensory organs. BOOM! The thing recognized itself as an entity called Bartholomew Bumble. Tick............tick.......tick..... tick...tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick...
A beam of light slashed through the darkness, revealing a slice of writing desk littered with papers and supporting a tomato can brimming with number two pencils. The beam struck downward across the room to the foot of a bookshelf of ancient, wood-and-leather-bound tomes. The beam stretched across centuries of humanity.
The entity Bartholomew Bumble gradually came into itself as if consciousness were being poured into it—for no other reason than that nature abhors a vacuum. Bartholomew Bumble, in this space... Linus Gimbal. Linus Gimbal was a friend to Bartholomew Bumble. Yes, he was in the house of Mr. Linus Gimbal.
That meant he was holding the Quantum Clepsydra, didn’t it? He certainly had been holding it. Was he holding it still? Yes, there was something hard and a little heavy in his right hand. He hoped he was oriented with his head away from the door to the living room. At least he was moderately sure that was the case. With that hope, he carefully backed up, and, with any good luck, away from the Disjunctive Chronoscope and the Retrogressive Chronomanifestor.
With much anxious difficulty, he was successful, for he felt the door rattling against his feet. Mentally crossing his fingers, he arose, using the doorknob to steady himself, and departed that reliquary. Discovering the living room still to be itself, he crossed it to the overstuffed chair that had been afforded to him, sat down, and gingerly placed the Quantum Clepsydra on the stand next to his bottle of Starmelon Orange.
Mr. Bumble was reluctant to remove his fingers from the Clepsydra. Doing so would mean fully returning to the mortal world and to his not-far-enough-in-the-future demise. So, he instead studied Mr. Gimbal before him in mid turn, reaching for the long-stemmed smoking pipe that lay in an ashtray on the nineteenth-century wooden stand next to his high-backed chair with the green-and-black tartan upholstery. A thin streak of blue-grey smoke like an ethereal spike pillared upward from the glowing embers inside the pipe’s bowl. That glow in that pipe was eternal. It could not fade. The tobacco within it would never burn away. Mr. Gimbal could savor its apple-infused aroma for ever and ever, and he would never endure cancers in his mouth, throat, and lungs. But he could never do anything else, of course. Mr. Bumble could travel the world, maybe rearrange everyone’s furniture, maybe steal all the money and buy himself physical immortality, and maybe do darker things—for who could stop him?—or even know that it was he who had done these things? Or, he could, if he felt the desire, rearrange matter in such a way that all those who had little would have much, and all those who had much would have little. Was he feeling his inner Robin Hood at this moment? Why, if he wanted, he might be able to build a stairway to Heaven, construct his very own Tower of Babel that reached right out of earth’s atmosphere, maybe even past the cloud of satellites and debris. And maybe from there he could leap off and drift lazily to the moon.
Maybe he would do that. Maybe he would cross to the dark side, let go of the Clepsydra, and let his frozen corpse stare off into the stark, pinpointed darkness and leave a mysterious trap for the poor heroic adventurer who would eventually come upon him and the clock. Not to mention, he’d leave quite a little poser for Mr. Gimbal, who would know the source of the riddle, the means by which the magical disappearance was achieved, but would be a long time considering what had become of Mr. Bumble and the precious clock. It pleased him to think of Mr. Gimbal muttering imprecations and wondering and wondering, and maybe never knowing, where Mr. Bumble had got to with that amazing Clepsydra. It enlivened him to think that Mr. Gimbal might believe he was off somewhere committing unspeakable crimes that he, Mr. Gimbal, had given him the power to perpetrate.
Of course, this was what Mr. Bumble really thought of himself. In his own view, he was a horrible lump of thumping flesh, a modestly sized ogre, who at any moment might fly out of his rickety castle on a rampage.
But by the livin’ Gawd that made him, he was neither a rude and rough British conqueror nor a brave, compassionate, long-suffering Gunga Din. No such rampage was imminent, no matter how much it drummed in his head that he was capable of it, yearning for it. So, he sat back, took the last swig of his Starmelon Orange, and considered.
His experience with the confluence of the exotic clocks—or their interference with one another—or the non-accidental accident that their proximity had generated—had not struck his re-wakened consciousness yet, as if he had been run over by a bus and was not yet feeling the pain. But now that he was aware that the shock of his trauma had not yet been visited upon him, a pressure wave began to build in his excitedly weary brain. The barely-recognized excitation built up swiftly to giddiness that manifested as eye-rolling chuckling. Suddenly, the pressure-wave exploded into the kind of migraine that causes great huge men to melt to the floor, holding their poor heads bracketed in their hands, staring expressionless at the sky, their mouths working pointlessly to produce sounds that no human can produce.
Inadvertently, Bartholomew Bumble had let go of the Clepsydra, and Linus Gimbal was the unfortunate witness to the lunatic episode. There was no medical aid to render for this particular condition, and much as Mr. Gimbal would like to have helped, he did nothing but watch the spectacle and suck absently at his pipe.
At last the rigor broke into epileptic shivering and shaking. Knowing what was coming, Mr. Gimbal pinned Mr. Bumble down as best as his elderly body could hold down such a heavy brute. The thrashing soon began in earnest, and Mr. Gimbal found himself sprawled on the floor, on his back, staring up in shock at the timepieces on his mantel.
When the violence finally subsided, little damage had been done, aside from the spilt-over stands and the scattered chairs. Mr. Gimbal painfully levered himself up and made sure Mr. Bumble was still among the living. Then he set about putting his living room to rights. He picked up the Quantum Clepsydra and replaced it in its drawer.

When he came back to himself, for the third time this evening, Bartholomew Bumble was achy and shaky. Though he knew Mr. Bumble didn’t partake of spirits, Mr. Gimbal had nonetheless prepared for him a glass of his best Scotch whiskey. Mr. Bumble quickly found it and gulped it. The two men waited in silence for the drink to do its work.
Mr. Gimbal was a man of amazing, perhaps preternatural, patience. He spent the long minutes puffing at his seemingly inexhaustible pipe. He seemed completely devoted to and fascinated by blowing smoke-rings, rings of great circumference, rings of such small circumference they might have fit a thimble, globular puffs of smoke like little vaporous worlds, and one truly incredible ring that spiralled out of the bowl like a galactic nebula. These marvelous smoke-rings went up at varying speeds, and some seemed to speed up or slow down, and the galaxy even spun three times. All the rings gently crashed into the ceiling, billowed and broke, and washed away like fog rolling out over a becalmed sea.
Mr. Bumble smiled a wan smile as the spiral nebula dissipated. He had seen countless numbers of them come into being and disappear into nothingness only an hour ago. All things eternal and all things simultaneously ephemeral, said his mind.
At least he thought he had only thought it, but Mr. Gimbal said, “Yes, Bartholomew, all things are flies in amber, held fast even as they flit about on their business. And what would we do without every last one of them doing its own little business, in its own little way, in its own little time?”
“Who are you?” asked Mr. Bumble.
“I’m Linus Gimbal, of course,” said Mr. Gimbal.
“Linus Gimbal is a name,” said Mr. Bumble, “an arrangement of letters that one becomes accustomed to, and maybe even enjoys the sound of. But who are you?”
“Do you mean to ask what I am?” asked Mr. Gimbal.
“Maybe,” responded Mr. Bumble, “but that’s a rude question. What makes you only an object, maybe something huge and important like a planet, but equally possibly something small and insignificant like a couch or a doorstop. What could make you an airplane, or a taxi cab, or a peddle car. You might turn out to be a nuclear missile, or merely a popgun. But it doesn’t give you any particular youness. I want to know who you are, who you think you are, in and of yourself, so that I can know better what to think of you.”
“That seems an even ruder question to my ears, Mr. Bumble,” said Mr. Gimbal, “extremely personal even for friends. I think it’s especially rude given that I have already answered it before it was asked. I am the object you see before you, its lips moving, its lungs breathing, its corporeality trying simultaneously and desperately to fly apart and to stick together. And I am universes upon universes—or I am a portal to universes upon universes. And you? Aren’t you essentially the same thing, in a slightly different form, sitting in a different position and with your own point of view intersecting at various points along a perceptual continuum with mine?”
“Hmmmm,” said Mr. Bumble. “But I am not in possession of what are essentially magical timepieces, handing them out to friends in need, herding friends off to Oz to meet the Wizard. Was it all a schizophrenic dream? Did any of it happen?”
“Why is it so important to know if any of it happened?” asked Mr. Gimbal. “Of course it happened. It was just as real as anyone should need it to be. All your own, internal dreams are supernal realities, as ‘real’ as you will allow them to be. You may be instructed by them or dismiss them, as is your wont.”
“That’s all philosophy,” said Mr. Bumble. “I want to know if it was physical reality. Are your magical clocks agents of transport, machines of telepathy, or clever props of suggestive hallucination? I want to know whether I’ve experienced real realities or whether I’ve been merely manipulated toward ends that aren’t immediately apparent to me.”
“You’ve read The Lord of the Rings, yes?” asked Mr. Gimbal.
“Yes,” said Mr. Bumble, “but...”
“What did Lord Denethor see in the Seeing-stone of Minas Tirith?” asked Mr. Gimbal.
“He saw a lot of things,” replied Mr. Bumble. “He saw armies marching from the South and the East to defeat his country. He saw armies making war on his ally Rohan. He saw his rival Aragorn coming to usurp his authority. He saw Gandalf, as he thought, manipulating events to his own ends. He saw what Sauron allowed him to see through the Stones. What are you getting at?”
“But was it real?” asked Mr. Gimbal.
“Real?” asked Mr. Bumble. “The Lord of the Rings was a real book in my hands. Tolkien really wrote it down on paper. Beyond that, no, it wasn’t real. I read it and was impressed by the imagination behind it, the way it gave the impression of reality without being actual and factual. It was a flight away from reality, an exciting diversion.”
“Then, you really didn’t understand the story or my question about events that occurred in it,” said Mr. Gimbal. “And you really ought to, given what you’ve just experienced.
“You’ve read Dune by Frank Herbert?” asked Mr. Gimbal.
“You know I have,” growled Mr. Bumble.
“When Paul Muad’dib drank the Water of Life, what did he see?” asked Mr. Gimbal.
“He saw many possible futures,” answered Mr. Bumble.
“He selected the one he liked best—or hated least—and discarded the others,” said Mr. Gimbal. “He then proceeded into that future. Did he choose the future, or did the future choose him? Was the future real, or did he help to make it real?”
“Maybe both?” said-asked Mr. Bumble.
“But when he saw the potential futures, did they exist, were they actual potentials, or were they hallucinations that he experienced as he tried to survive the deadly Water of Life?” asked Mr. Gimbal.
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Bumble. “It was a story. It wasn’t real life.”
“If there are other universes—I say ‘if’ because you are having trouble believing—“ said Mr. Gimbal, “and someone from one of them were looking in on you and your life, how would your life seem to them?”
“Like a life someone was living.” said a very irritated Mr. Bumble, his hands clutching the arms of his chair, his arms tense, his head slightly forward, his eyes trying to bore holes into his tormentor. “I am actually a living thing, so this hypothetical person would see someone living an actual, fully-detailed life, not a made-up story with huge parts of the actual lives of its characters missing. Characters don’t even take a pee in a story unless it’s significant.”
“You’re being deliberately obtuse, I think,” said Mr. Gimbal, “and unimaginative. Stories are arrangements of sounds emanating from a sound-maker, or arrangements of letters on a surface or in a holographic projection. You might say they are nothing more than that, since you insist on the literal. But they have meaning, don’t they?”
“They can,” answered Mr. Bumble.
“Not only can they,” said Mr. Gimbal, “but they all do. You can bet that whatever arrangements you devise, at least some of your phonemes or letters will have some significance to some intelligent entity. And a million different species of intelligence may come across these arrangements, experience them, and they will all have a different opinion of the significance. If you take this as truth, then you must, if you’re being honest, conclude that all arrangements have meaning, even if they were never deliberately arranged, and even if they were never intended to have meaning. Further, it must be concluded that all meanings are subjective, formed from the point of view of whomever is experiencing these arrangements.”
“You should be careful about making stands-to-reason type arguments,” said Mr. Bumble. “You’re assuming that there are other intelligent species’ and that their modes of communication are so radically different from ours that they will have very different interpretations of all that they see or hear. And, behind that, you’re assuming that stories have necessarily, no matter how insightfully or blitheringly authored, some application to the real world.”
“Alright, Bartholomew,” said Mr. Gimbal. “I haven’t offered you proof that suffices to your needs. Why is that? Are we not both made of essentially the same stuff? Are we not both seated in comfy chairs in the same living room? Were we not both brought up on the same little planet orbiting the same little sun? When you speak of urination, have we not both urinated, and so understand the significance of urination? These are rhetorical questions, of course, but nonetheless significant. We share experience, substance, and locality—but we are apparently much in disagreement. Why?”
Slowly, Mr. Gimbal replied, “We have interpreted our common experiences in slightly different ways, and we each have had our own, separate experiences.”
“I can agree to that,” said Mr. Gimbal. “And to me, your experiences are a story and the truth together. I didn’t live them, and I can’t verify them, except inasmuch as I accept your reality and your truthfulness. But I don’t need to live them or to verify them in order to find usefulness in them. Have you ever observed some person or some other creature, what she does and how she does it, and judged whether or not you thought this person or creature sensible or foolish? And, if so, did you need to touch this entity to know it was real in order to render your judgement? And if you read about someone from Africa in the newspaper, was the story sufficient unto itself, or did you need to go to that person’s country in Africa, look him up, touch him, and then ask him to repeat the story?”
“I guess you know the answer to those questions,” said Mr. Bumble, still annoyed, but relaxing.
“What’s more,” said Mr. Gimbal, “you accept the reality of reality as you know it, do you not?”
“Of course,” replied Mr. Bumble.
“But what is it?” asked Mr. Gimbal.
“Huh?” responded Mr. Bumble.
“What is reality?” asked Mr. Gimbal.
“You’ve got a point to make,” said Mr. Bumble, “so you tell me.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Gimbal. “You feel reality by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting, so you accept it. You see living and dying, drinking and peeing, eating and pooping, and you accept these as necessities. You see gravity pulling things to the earth, and you accept unseen forces acting in ways that can be observed. But what is reality? Of what substance is it made? What enables the various forces to function, and what law governs the laws of nature? Some people say that forces beyond our comprehension uphold these realities. Some say God. Some say Chance. All, even the maddest, accept reality as something. But none of us really knows of what it is made. The only answer we have to answer such mysteries is Mystery. And all we experience around us, whether we label it fact or fiction, is an arrangement of incomprehensible particles and forces. We have the delusion that we comprehend them, but we don’t really understand at all.
“Cogito ergo sum. We only know that we exist—because we recognize that we exist.”
“So the answer to my question is ‘shut up and accept it’” asked Mr. Bumble.
“Not in such harsh terms,” said Mr. Gimbal, smiling.
“So, you think I’m supposed to have learned something from my experience, eh?” said Mr. Bumble.
“Well,” said Mr. Gimbal, “I think, rather, that you think you’re supposed to have learned something. You have told me on more than one occasion that you don’t do anything without a compelling reason.”
“I see,” said Mr. Bumble. “So, I will insist on having learned something. But why do you need to get my impressions—and now, while I’m still in a bit of a shock?”
“I have never had this particular experience,” said Mr. Gimbal, “and I wish to know something of what to expect. I need your impressions at this moment, before you’ve had a chance to further filter them. The ‘real’ world, of course, will intrude upon your memories, change them.
“Every human being is a palimpsest, you see. Every moment writes across all their pages, and it doesn’t take long to write over them so many times that you can’t tell who wrote what on those pages, or when it was written.
“But you are a stubborn man, Bartholomew Bumble, and the more explanations I give you, the more you oppose my request for your impressions on mere principle. So, I must ask you, Bartholomew Bumble, will you honor my request, as the one who made your experiences possible, or will you continue to oppose it?”
Slowly, Mr. Bumble said, “Tell me just one more thing, Linus. You said that you haven’t had this particular experience. What did you mean?”
“Well,” responded Mr. Gimbal, “as I said, I have never touched more than one of my special timepieces simultaneously. But I have had a very transformative experience with more than one of them. The one that most stands out is the time I laid hands on my Panunitarian Clock. That chronometer, you see, gives you an all-in-one experience. That is, it causes you to experience all the events, from the beginning of the universe, that led directly to your existence in the particular moment when you touch the Clock—and all the events that lead directly away from you. I know many things that, according to convention, I am not supposed to know. I can and will tell you no more than that. And now I renew my question to you.”
      “Linus Gimbal, I honor you,” said Mr. Bumble. “I very much detest being manipulated, but I trust your motives. You are the only person left in this world that I truly honor, and never moreso than tonight—or, rather, this morning. But your request sort of puts me in the headlights, like an animal on the road at night. I seize up when difficult information is demanded of me. If you were to ask me about trains, or books I’ve read, or movies I’ve watched, I could give you enough details to make you wish early on that you hadn’t asked me. But this... I hate alcohol. It tastes like poison to me. Could I have another glass of whatever that was you gave me?”
So, Mr. Gimbal re-opened his bottle of Windsor XR, which he had saved back specifically for this occasion, and poured out another healthy glass of it for Mr. Bumble. It smelled malty and smoky, pleasant, even though Mr. Bumble could smell the alcohol. He picked up the glass and rolled it round with his fingers, studying it, reluctant to drink. But, as had been said of him, he was a person who did nothing without a compelling reason, and he was damned if he was going to make a liar out of himself, so, after another moment of hesitation, he put the glass to his lips and downed the stuff. It was, to his sensibilities, a grotesquely beautiful experience. It burnt, like strong spirits should, but it was full of pleasant notes, despite its alcoholic poisonousness. Despite gagging slightly, he almost enjoyed the aftertaste of the Scotch. And that set him in a much fairer mood even before the anti-inhibitory effects began to take hold.
“Um, thank you,” said Mr. Bumble, smiling distantly. “I haven’t had much experience with alcohol, but I imagine this is the good stuff. I’d better give you your money’s worth.”
He sat back into the chair and stretched himself a little, and then sighed lugubriously. Making a writing gesture with an imaginary pen gripped in his left hand, Mr. Bumble said: “What I brought home from my summer vacation, by Bartholomew Bumble.” He chuckled. “Well,” he said, “I never was very imaginative in my writing.”
He took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out long and loudly. “I guess the thing that comes to me foremost is that, if I am to believe in the truth of my experience, there are an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of things going on in them. Everything that could possibly happen has happened, is happening, and/or will happen somewhere. I ttthhhiiinnnkkk it’s com-pleeet bulllll-puckeeeee! Hahahahaha!
“But there you are. Aaaarrrrr! Aaarrr, yes, there’s my treasuuurrreee, Polleee! ‘Cause if that’s true, there’s an infinite number of Mister Bartholomew Bumbles, Sergeant Bartholomew Bumbles, Lord Bartholomew Bumbles, Bartholomew Bumble Esquires, and Captain Bartholomew Bumbles. There’s small ones, tall ones, fat ones, skinny ones, young ones, old ones. And a gold doubloon to ye if ye find me the one with the biggest penis! Yar! I want that one: he be a tissue match for me, and I want his treasure for me own. Hahar! I’m never going to get laid, you know.
“Mr. Bartholomew Bumble has a panessent immortality, he does. I coined that just now—panessent. It’s mine; you can’t have it. I, me, exist across infinite timmmmmes and spacezzzz. One of them fuckin’ Barthol’mew Bumblesesss is gettin’ laid right now—but not meee, in this Gawd awful un’verse. Dammit, I’m sssssnockerrrredd! It’s too much, Linuss, too much.”
He leaned over and his head and shoulder came to rest on one of the massive wings of his chair. He snored for a few minutes, and then his breath caught, and his eyes flew open with a start. “It’s too much. Did I say it was too much? Well, it is. It’s like having ten thousand lives all jammed into my life. It was like reading all the books that were ever written—all in the space between one tick of the clock and the next. Your whatchacallit Clock made you see all the moments of you, but I saw other peoples’ moments. I lived other peoples’ moments, too many of them. I’ve got the autism, you know. It’s a grotesquerie for me to have other people all jammed up in my mental cloaca.
“Didn’t see me at all, you know. I guess if there was a point to it, that wasss it? It ain’t alll ‘bout meeee, isss it? Other peoples have got lives all their own, thinkin’ their own thoughts, havin’ their own ‘speriences, an’ what not. I’m gonna die of the cancer of the pancreas, an’ the worl’, the un’verse, the mult’verse is gonna sail right on. Peoples are gonna come in an’ go out, but i’sss okay, ‘cause there’s an inf’nite nummer of them—an inf’nite nummer of each of them. They can’t really die, an’ they alllll live an inf’nite nummer of poss’bil’tiesssss. Fuck ‘em all, the dumb fuckersss. The smart fuckersss. Fuckety-fuckerssss.”
He fell back to sleep for nearly an hour this time, snoring gently. Mr. Gimbal sat silently, puffing at his inexhaustible pipe, the red cherry reflecting demonic pinpoints in his eyes.
At last, Mr. Bumble’s eyes popped back open. He looked absently in Mr. Gimbal’s direction for half a minute, then smacked his dry lips. Mr. Gimbal got up and got some water for him, and then sat back down and worked some more at his pipe. Mr. Bumble sipped at the water and then said: “No more. No more alcohol, ever. I hate being out of control, especially when an outside agent takes away my control.” He sniffed at the air and asked: “Why am I not choking on pipe-smoke? You’ve been puffing like a wet fire since the night started. There should’ve been a flashover, and the house should’ve burnt down by now.”
“It’s just another of my mysteries, Bartholomew,” said Mr. Gimbal. “Would you like to hear another?”
“Um, sure,” said Mr. Bumble. “Hey, before you tell me, I’d like to make a deal with you.”
“Yes?” said Mr. Gimbal.
“I normally hate people calling me Bart,” said Mr. Bumble, “but if we weren’t true friends before tonight, I think we are now. I thank you for respecting my hatred of ‘Bart’, but, if you’re willing, please call me Bart from now on. I’ll still hate everyone else doing it, but not you. It’ll be our secret club handshake.”
“Alright—Bart.” said Mr. Gimbal. “And, if you will, please call me Linus. I don’t think there is anything reasonably shorter than that for you to call me. Calling me ‘Line’ would just be silly.”
“It’s a deal, Mr. Linus,” said Bart, smiling through his throbbing head.
“Well—Mr. Bart,” said Linus, “do you have anything to add to the impressions you’ve given me so far?”
“Hm,” responded Bart. “The full impact of it is slipping away. The fire’s starting to cool, you might say. My point of view may have shifted by virtue of having experienced so many different points of view—which was the point, I guess.
“I guess that’s what I find so objectionable about thinking of my experiences of those other lives as having actually happened. It’s intolerable, or, rather, without the aid of alcohol it was intolerable.
“These experiences I’ve had—well, you proved them, rhetorically at least, to be real enough for a human to base beliefs on. And I don’t like that. I’m forced, then, to think of other points of view. I hate that. I need it. Now, I have it, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
He was silent for a few moments. Linus said nothing. This made Bart more than a little cross, but he sipped at his water and kept himself under control, despite the lingering effects of the Scotch.
“So,” said Linus, “what are you driving at?”
“I’m metaphorically driving off a cliff,” said Bart. “But you obviously want me to turn aside and continue whatever journey I set out on. I want you to help me understand why I should. It’s a great burden you’ve placed on yourself, but you did it when you took me into your house, shared my soda with me, and then handed me that horrible Clock of yours. I am perhaps in your debt, but you are equally in mine. I’m physically okay—setting aside the cancer—but I didn’t ask to be, and I certainly didn’t ask for reasons to doubt my resolve. If you wish me to pay you back for your patience and concern by living on, or at least trying to live on, then pay me what you owe me: give me reasons to pay up.”
“You know, of course, that I am prepared for your request,” said Linus, smiling as he carefully replaced his pipe in its tray. “I will start by telling you one of the consequences of my encounter with the Panunitarian Clock.
“A few days after that experience, I began to have some trouble keeping my balance and remembering events that I had always remembered vividly. I had difficulty recognizing places and faces—including yours, and even my own. I remembered how to cook and how to dress, but I couldn’t recognize kitchen utensils and appliances, and I couldn’t identify pieces of clothing. At first it was very momentary, but then the empty spaces began to linger for hours at a time. During a fully lucid period, I managed to get myself out to St. Cuthbert’s to be evaluated.
“Tests revealed that I was developing a hole in my temporal lobe, in the right hemisphere of my brain. It was as if I had a third lateral ventricle, full of cerebrospinal fluid like the others, but in the wrong place. You didn’t see me during that time because I could hardly walk or talk, and I didn’t really care about you, or the rest of the world, or even myself. I was in a sort of hebephrenic fugue. It was as if I had had a major stroke and a part of my brain had died off and evaporated away.
“There was no one with my power-of-attorney, and I had forgotten that I had an identification card of any kind, or a name, or, by the time I arrived at the hospital, a place of residence. My seeming lack of wherewithal didn’t stop the Compassionate Sisters of St. Cuthbert taking good care of me. As I understand it, I stayed in the hospital nearly five months before other parts of my brain had sufficiently compensated for my loss that I could get on with a modestly normal life. Of course, you didn’t know about it because you never go out, and because your mother was too busy caring for you and your father to care much about me.
“I am not a particularly God-fearing person, but Reverend Mother Demeira saw something good and useful in me, and her order sponsored me. I find your attitude toward them more than a little troubling. I have been almost angry with you. I never told you that, of course, because it would probably have made you even more stubborn.”
“I’m sorry, Linus,” said Bart, tearing up a little. “I’ve been a bad friend, and you’ve been a very good one.”
“You can’t help it, Bart,” said Linus. “I don’t say that to be cruel or condescending, but merely to state a fact and relieve you of a burden. You’re not wired the way other people are. That is not necessarily bad or good, but simply a difference. You have your charms, but being friendly and outgoing can’t be counted among them. But as the Sisters saw something in me, I see something good and valuable in you. Please don’t ask me to name it. Just accept it.”
“I’ll try,” said Bart. He sipped the last of his water and slumped in his chair. What foolishness, he thought, to speak about Linus owing me anything. I’m so deep in his debt there’s no hope I’ll ever really pay him back.
“Well,” said Linus, “it’s probably time for you to go now. I’ve already influenced your perceptions of your big experience more than I probably should have.”
“Um, alright,” said Bart. “Hm. Goodbye—for the moment.”
“Goodbye, Bart,” said Linus. “Have a good sleep. I haven’t needed sleep in several years, not since the Panunitarian Clock. I think I’ll have a couple of stiff belts of the Scotch and see if it’s still possible.”
“Good luck,” said Bart. He was astonished by the idea that Linus hadn’t slept in years, but he didn’t want to let on about the weirdness of it. Linus Gimbal had turned out to be a quite astonishing human being. It was a shame he had never before taken pains to get to know this man but had considered time with him a faintly pleasurable chore.
















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