A Darkness In My Soul Part 13

He shuffled the papers in his hand, went on. "According to the reports, three officers will have died under your guns. We've made up life histories for them, all very touching. Two of them had large families and one had a brother who was a priest We've put together composite photographs of various real officers to release to the press.

Later tonight, word will be flashed to an outraged nation that you have died on the operating table. Even though you slaughtered the howler crew and three other policemen, we were trying to save you, see? Now, the first order of business today is for you to come along and help us film the operating room sequences. A double won't work in bright lights. I hope you can die convincingly, or at least pretend to look dead while you're lying there.

Otherwise, you'll have to be drugged for it.

He stopped, watching me. It was time for my part, and my lines were crystal clear to me. "Look, how about a bargain," I said. I sounded fairly desperate.

He smiled. He was eating this up. Morsf.a.gen's weakness was not in his rigid acceptance of military codes and consensus views, but in his need for power over other human beings, his delight at being on top of another man.

I was giving him exactly what he wanted.

Maybe he would just hang himself with it.

"I fail to see," he said, "just what you have to bargain with." He motioned around at the windowless walls.

"Something you don't know," I said. "Something that, if you knew, would help you a great deal."

He frowned, smiled again. "And what would you want for this valuable piece of information?"

"My freedom. Melinda's freedom. We'd stay in the city.

I'd do whatever you want."

"Oh, I hardly believe you would," he said.

"Look, Morsf.a.gen, I'm not kidding you. I have something to tell you that could make a very big difference to the Alliance. I am not lying, and you must believe that."

"I'd love to hear it," he said, dragging this out to relish every moment of my groveling. "But you must choose some other reward besides your freedom."

"Let the girl and me live here together. At least don't keep us in separate apartments."

He smiled, seemed to consider it. "All right. She is some nice piece, I'll tell you. That ought to be a big enough reward. Now tell me what this secret is?"

I started to speak, then stopped abruptly, just as I had planned, examining him with a great deal of suspicion. I must have looked pathetic, hunched there on the edge of the bed, unshaven, trying to bargain for petty favors that would come without question to a free man. It was the image I wanted him to have of me. "How do I know I can trust you?" I asked. "How do I know you'll keep your promise?"

He laughed sharply, deeply. "You don't."

"But that's not right!" I said. There was just the edge of a whine in my voice. I was a broken man, yes I was. I was just so many pieces for him to break further into dust.

"Fairness doesn't apply here," he said. "You'll just have to trust me. Or forget it all."

I hesitated. "I have nothing to lose, I guess," I said. "So I'll tell you." I hesitated again. Then I spoke: "I lied to you when I saw it was dangerous for me to go back into Child's mind. I just said that to get back into my own body and to get out of the AC complex. I can go back into him any time that I want, and I can bring a great deal of valuable data out to you."

He burst into loud, almost uncontrolled laughter, his face growing red. He slapped his sides with his hands, almost dropping the sheaf of papers, and finally the laughter turned into a choking cough. When he looked up at me again, he said, "I thought that much all along. I hadn't yet decided to risk sending you back, 'cause you're too valuable to lose. In a police state, an esper has more duties hunting the enemy at home than abroad. Now I can take the risk and clean out that freak's mind too. I thank you for your kind a.s.sistance in this decision." He nodded sarcastically.

"When will the girl be brought to me?" I asked, though I knew the answer already.

"You trusted me," he said. "I appreciate that. It shows that we will be getting along better than antic.i.p.ated."

"I hope so."

"But there is one thing I think you should learn, for your own good," he said. He waited until there was no alternative but for me to ask him what that lesson was.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Trust no one," he said. "The girl will remain in a separate apartment."

I made a lunge for him, and the guard beside him slapped me across the face with the b.u.t.t of a rifle. It was a deal more than I had bargained for. My jaws snapped together, banging my teeth painfully into my gums. I saw stars, multicolored one with a thousand points each, and crashed back onto the bed.

I tasted blood, spat it on the sheets. It was curiously bright there, glistening.

"Have you learned the lesson?" he asked.

"You lied," I said.

"I guess you've learned the lesson, then."

"That all military men are emasculated power freaks who can't make it with a woman but dig beating up on other men with guns."

"Keep it up," he warned.

"s.e.xless b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" I hissed.

"Larry," he called to the young soldier. The boy stepped forward, holding his rifle ready. Morsf.a.gen motioned to me, quite the cavalier, and conveyed the necessity of what must be done.

Larry took two more paces, stepped in front of me, drew the rifle over his head-all of this happening so slowly, so measuredly that it seemed like a ballet-and brought the square b.u.t.t down on my left shoulder so hard that I felt tissue separating.

I did not see the pretty stars at all this time, only a velvety and total darkness*

When I woke up, it was to the acrid odor of smelling salts which I rebelled against, gagging and pushing back from the stuff. But aside from that quite natural rejection, I offered no opposition. For the moment, Morsf.a.gen was convinced he knew me. He suspected nothing and thought my anger was genuine.

I followed docilely to the corridor, the elevator, and the filming studios, where I played dead for them. Quite convincingly, he told me. They even let me bleed a little for them*

By late afternoon, the films had been made. There was a team waiting to rush the product to the city's main broadcasting facilities, where it would be shown for the edification and entertainment of the consensus citizenry sitting safe at home this night.

From there, we went to Child's room, where nothing had changed: lights dim, bedclothes rumpled, the mutant husk still lying there in the smell of sickness, antiseptics, and starch.

"Are you ready?" Morsf.a.gen asked.

I'm not only ready, but anxious! I thought. But I did not say anything. It seemed the time to be petulant, snippy, moody. And he seemed to relish my performance.

The lights were dimmed, the recorders started, Child raised a little in his bed, and I was at last within reach of the G.o.dhood I had been seeking all my life*

FOUR.

Man As G.o.d*

I.

I touched the sheen of His mental surface, drew back from the cold, humming tune of ultimate power.

In the darkness of the empty conscious mind, I hovered over the bending amber sh.e.l.l, slid along its eternal curve toward the horizon which always danced just beyond my grasp. In time, I found the weak spot on that amber smoothness, saw the moving shadows of things beneath, of things in the id and ego below. I pried at that weak spot, slit it open, sailed through and into G.o.d's mind*

Imagine: Imagine the largest mirror in the universe, a million light-years from edge to beveled edge (no matter who the artisans were who created such a marvel, it is only the mirror itself which engages us). On such a great gla.s.s, there would be literally countless millions of visions, bits and pieces of colorful landscapes and peoples, events and futures and pasts and even moments of sundry presenttunes. Further imagine a cosmic hammer as large as a star (again, we care not of the men who forged that instrument, but only of its actions) brought to bear on the very center of that fantastic mirror. And then imagine the flying shards of silvered gla.s.s clattering down, down, down into the bottom of Existence, to the end of Time, and there to lie in pools of pitch blackness with their wild reflections frozen in them.

This was the mental landscape inside of Child this time, far different from what it had been. It was a mind of superhuman dimensions, fractured into near uselessness, the mind of G.o.d, the Being who had made the Earth, the galaxy, the universe, and each of us in it, the G.o.d who had forged the first DNA and RNA and begun the craziest dream ever. And yet it was the most disorganized place I had ever seen-disorganized and brilliant at the same moment, wilder, stranger, more fearful than any mind I had seen in all my years of head-tripping.

I settled through glazes of amber* * through ice spicule clouds the color of freshly spilled blood* * through a fine blue fog and finally down into the smashed visions of this mad universe*

For a while I hung there, feet of my a.n.a.logue body inches above a glittering shard of stars. Then I touched bare toes on galaxies and walked across the ruined skies to another fragment, this a jungle scene with strange birds and stranger ambulatory plants. I seemed to settle down into the jungle, to become a part of it, though the moment I wished to go on I ceased this empathy and rose until I stood above it, looking down on it-and looking out on the millions of other scenes awaiting me on the flat black table of nothingness.

I set out, searching for the core of G.o.d, for the shattered gla.s.s that held Him.

He could not be far.

Wasn't G.o.d everywhere?

I walked through a place of flowers where the earth was as thick as water reeds with boles as large around as two men could link their arms. The leaves were high overhead and did not allow even a minim of sunshine through.

I walked through a place of flowers where the earth was carpeted with an explosion of ripe colors, where clouds of spores rose and swept by me as their season came, where seeds stuck to my a.n.a.logue body from the sappy tendrils of man-sized milkweed plants.

I saw a red sky with a blue sun, and the land was parched and empty beneath both.

Twice as I wandered, I felt His onrushing presence, the huge power of His disabled mind. I reached out, grasping blindly for Him, but He was gone in the instant, leaving me groping and frustrated.

Several times, the sky itself came screaming down, compressing the air beneath it until my a.n.a.logue body threatened to explode. The sky shattered around me, was resurrected as flocks of blue-white birds, and rose again to hang high over everything.

The earth rose and fell like a beating breast, the vibrations of the heart muscle coursing through me.

There were creatures with many eyes, others with more legs than I could count.

Dead birds fell from the sky by the tens of thousands, became lizards when they struck the earth, climbed the rocks about me, grew wings, and entered the clouds again.

There were places where the trees wailed and broke open with ugly sores, bled as if they were made of flesh.

The dripping blood became crimson pebbles where the tree touched the earth.

I stalked through this chaos, searching.

At last, I came upon Him where He was desperately trying to coalesce into an a.n.a.logue form with which He could contact me. He was a smoky, bluish pillar of psychic energy, roiling, tumbling, spitting sparks of many colors, at last jelling into the shape of a man: Buddha.

"It is a wise man who knows how to compromise,"

Buddha said, rubbing His large bare belly and smiling down at me. He towered twenty feet into the air.

"I will not compromise," I said.

"The seven lives-"

I pushed on. "I will not compromise." I extended fingers of my own psychic energy, and felt out the core of G.o.d, seeking for the pattern to its structure.

The figure shifted, became an image of Jesus Christ.

"Truly, I say unto you, a man who recognizes his own mortality is a happier man. A man who comes to live with his weakness with all humility is a man destined for my kingdom."

I grasped Jesus' neck with psychic hands and throttled Him.

He exploded, whirled into a column of energy, a furious, storming energy that longed to strike out at me but could not. Power is useless without a mechanism to harness and control it, and His mechanism had long ago deteriorated beyond the point of effectiveness. G.o.d was a hugely powerful pool of psychic energy without a manipulatory system: a car without wheels.

I reached with my own mental tendrils, and oblivious to the halfhearted and misdirected weapons He brought to bear against me, also oblivious of His pitiful pleading, I threaded him. He wanted to maintain His power, even though He was insane, and I could not make Him understand that it was time for a new G.o.d.

He wriggled and twisted in a vain attempt to pull free of me.

As I encircled Him, I knew that G.o.d had been insane long before Child had ever approached Him, had been a raving and incoherent ma.s.s of energy for-perhapsmillennia. All mankind's faiths had failed to understand the basic reason for chaos, for blind violence and hatred.

We had attributed all the bad things of this world to "divine tests" of man's will and courage. But all of that was a theological falsehood, for the force energizing the universe was madness, not reason; insanity and not mercy. The madness had reached even the smallest particle of His being, aged like wine into the purest elements of horror.

Here died Jesus.

And Mohammed.

Here died Buddha and Yahweh.

But it was not all a loss.

For here, at last, I was born in my new image, to replace half a thousand false G.o.ds.

Burn the old altars and prepare new ones. Council your children with different commandments and slaughter the freshest of your lambs so that I may taste their blood in the morning dew.

I bled His energy away just as I might have tapped a dynamo or a battery, distributed it through my own psychic power until He was no longer a separate ent.i.ty but merely another area of my own mind, as Child now was, another rising bank of power cells to draw upon for the creation of miracles. Not a shred of His personality or self-awareness remained; for all purposes, He had diedor had been transubstantiated, which was all the same now. His memories had been evaporated, and only the magnificent white brilliance of His power remained, condensed, purified, and made ready for use. For my use. It was now, after all, my power.

I had killed G.o.d, quite simply, just as I had killed Child some days before.

I felt no remorse.

Does one feel remorse when one shoots down a maniac who is wielding a gun in a crowded department store?

Man as G.o.d. I retained the mortal form and the mortal outlook, with the emotions and the prejudices of men. I did not think that would be a weakness, but that it might actually make me a more benevolent and stable deity than the previous owner of my power had been. Man as G.o.d*