A Darkness in My Soul

by Dean R. Koontz

  Otherwise, why would you worship me?

  I departed from the minds in the room, though I did not summon anyone back to consciousness. I did not need their help to command the tides and to grow storms in the heavens-nor for the much broader changes I wished to bring about in the world.

  I settled down to bringing a new face to the Earth, enjoying every moment of my godhood-perhaps too well

  III

  And there, in that hospital room in the upper floors of the Artificial Creation complex, with the dead and bleeding mutant form before me, I knew the greatest triumphs of my entire life. I ranged far from those white walls, though I never once rose from the chair in which I sat. I flew over seas and continents without benefit of a bodywithout even an analogue form-to contain my psychic energies. Miracles were within my grasp now, and though I did not change any water into wine or raise any men from the dead, I did other things, yes, other things

  The first order of business, so far as I was concerned, was to reach downward through the floors of the great structure and locate that place where I had been born, where plastic womb had contained me and where wired uterus had spit me out. It was no sentimental journey, no longing for a return to those cold mother walls, but the bitter-sweet taste of a deeply abiding vengeance.

  I sent my awareness drifting down through the layers of the huge building, through plaster and lath, plastic and steel, through electrical conduits and wads of fluffy insulating material. I passed the radiating awareness of other human beings, but did not stop to handle them just yet, bent on the confrontation I had dreamed of for years.

  Oedipal?

  Not exactly. I did not want to kill my father and marry my mother, merely to kill my mother and be free. Certainly, there was a quality of love in it too, but that was easily overlooked.

  I found the lowest two floors, where the paraphernalia of the genetic engineers cored the walls like fungus, filaments threaded through the plaster like disease worms.

  Machines descended from the ceilings of the rooms, thrust upward from the floors. There were blocks of data processing computers, memory banks and calculating components which handled everything from temperature regulation to DNA-RNA balance in the chemical sperm and egg.

  Along the walls and on various raised platforms around the floor there were programming keyboards for the men and women who maintained the delicacy of the computers' decisions.

  In every great chamber, the center of attention was the womb itself. It was contained in a large, square glass tank whose exterior walls were more than three inches thick.

  Between these outer petitions and the meat of the nut, there were thinner layers of grass along with fiberglass wads of insulation. In the center were the nonconductive plastic walls, cored with the miles of wires reporting conditions back to the computers. There were electrode nubbins there by the tens of thousands, and waldoes so minuscule as to be unbelievable were doing impossibly tiny things to impossibly tiny creations, spheres of cells not yet remotely shaped like human beings.

  Mother

  The womb, darkness, quietude, thrumming pulse of hidden works felt more than heard

  There were more than eighty technicians and medical attendants clustered in the rooms of the genetic engineering equipment, all of them busy. I reached out with my godly esp and took control of every one of their minds.

  Work ceased; conversation broke off in midsentence. I directed them out of that place, upward through the building to regions of safety.

  I surveyed the place as a sense of power stirred in me the like of which I had never experienced before. It was not the magnitude of the feeling, but the quality which made it so different. For the first time, I understood my godhood in a personal sense, understood that revenge was possible on a scale that I had never before comprehended.

  I had not been able to release that pent-up vengeance on a man, like Morsfagen, because pity had outweighed anger.

  But I could never pity a machine, a thing without feelings.

  I realized that my vengeance would always have to be directed against ideas and things and constructions borne of those ideas rather than against men; all men were pitiable in their stupid blindness to fact, but the creations of that stupidity, the ideas and ideals based on that stupidity deserved nothing but loathing and condemnation.

  For a moment, I had the fleeting thought that this sense of power over the artificial wombs was much like the sense of power which the young guard at the Tombs had experienced in his fantasies about slaughtering his parents in their bed. Like him, I was rising up against the most fundamental loyalty of my life, against the salty seed and the warm womb which had engendered me (albeit, with the aid of some eighty technicians and physicians and computer programmers). But I thrust that notion down and got on with the job at hand.

  I raised my figurative ax over my mother's symbolic head and savored the destruction I was about to wreak

  Did Jesus think of striking Mary down? Hardly. But I had given up that vision of God. I was another sort altogether.

  I split open the surfaces of the walls and peeled back the plastic and the plaster, revealed the snaking conduits and the tangled ganglion of wires. I grasped these nerves gleefully and tore them free of the womb structures, sent the complex mechanisms into shuddering, heavy spasms of mechanical terror and confusion, into wrenching machine agony that drew smoke rather than blood or tears.

  Moving swiftly, almost maniacally, I wrenched the programming keyboards loose of their connections and smashed them repeatedly into the floor.

  The wombs were no longer connected to a brain to tell them what to do with themselves.

  Smoke rose from the blocks of data-processing equipment, and tapes whined senselessly through the memory banks, seeking answers that could not be found.

  There was but one answer, and that answer was God, and that God was me

  I shattered the glass outer walls of all the wombs, The floor was littered with fragments of sharp, bright, and bloodless flesh.

  I broke inward, reached the heart of each warm, dark chamber, and shredded the slowly forming germ cells, squashed them.

  I destroyed the wombs from inside, working back toward the shattered outer walls until there was nothing left but powder and fumes.

  It must have looked singularly strange in that place: invisible hands making havoc in the center of that technological wonder; explosions without origin; plastic dribbling down and lying in cooling puddles on the floor; smoke rising everywhere It must have looked as if Nature had risen up in fury to dispose of such a blasphemous and pretentious project as this last folly of man's.

  In essence, that was exactly what had happened.

  Mother was dead.

  And she was disfigured.

  I had never had a father.

  I left that place of smoldering memories, of twisted plastic and running wires, jellied tubes and transistors, returned to the hospital room where my body sat in the same chair where I had left it. Morsfagen and the others remained in a state of suspended animation, offering no resistance.

  In a few moments, I had made all the necessary decisions; I knew what had to be done next. I had decided everything with the speed and the thoroughness of a super-computer, my thought processes racing faster and faster as the godly power within me became further integrated with my own mind. And I knew there were no flaws in my plans.

  A god is not plagued with doubt.

  I divorced my mind from my body again, and sought out of the AC complex, across vast stretches of land toward the minds of other men, where I would begin to build the new world. I found the members of the junta, one by one, and altered their minds. I rooted deeply, found their personality problems and removed them. I gave them the best psychotherapy man had ever imagined, and left them without a desire to rule.

  Then; in each man's mind, I planted the desire for a return to elective government, and left them as their own counter-revolutionaries.

  Next, I began a methodical s
earch of the corners of the world; I radiated a growing, toughening web of power that sought out the minds of every leader in every nation, down through the lowest bureaucratic posts. I cleared those minds of power-hunger, of sexual frustration turned into violence. I healed them like a prophet with the power of god in his hands, and I left them better men.

  Not satisfied yet, I struck downward and located — all the men with the potential of leadership, even though they were not yet in positions to guide the destinies of their fellow citizens. I cleaned house in every psyche, helped all of them to learn to cope with existence and with their own place in the scheme of things.

  And still my power grew. Or, perhaps, the more I used it, the better my manipulatory mechanisms became.

  Next, I found the stockpiles of nuclear weapons hidden in all corners of the globe. I turned the fissionable material into lead by making Time flow a million times faster around the vicinity of the weapons. In the biochemical warfare laboratories, I destroyed all the mutant strains of death that scientists had generated. I opened the minds of those same scientists and cleansed them, made them reject the need to create death in order to feel worthy and powerful.

  And the day wore on.

  And evening came.

  Still, I toiled.

  It was somewhere beyond midnight when I finished reshaping the world and returned to my body in the AC complex. With all that I had done, I still felt energetic.

  None of my vitality had been sapped; it even seemed to have been magnified. The power I wielded was now more complex and enormous than I could ever have imagined.

  I stretched my esp out and lingered along the surface of the moon, looking firsthand at the craters with eyes I constructed from the cold vacuum of space.

  Stars winked close at hand, warm and yet freezing, pricks of light, yet mammoth stars.

  I sped outward to them.

  I touched red giants and white dwarfs, plummeted through the center of a sun, listening to the songs of exploding hydrogen, to the creation of matter, and to its instant destruction-or, rather, to its instant conversion into light and heat.

  Energy

  I seemed to gain energy from every source I approached.

  My own light was brighter than that from any star, and was controlled far more intricately, making it more deadly and more important than countless suns in mindless eruption.

  I passed outward beyond the galaxy.

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

  And then I came back, skipping from galaxy to galaxythen from star to star-then from planet to planet, finally back into the room where my mortal shell sat stupidly.

  I rose up from the chair and left that room after turning Morsfagen and the others loose. I walked down the corridor and found Melinda's rooms, opened the door without touching it, and walked inside. I could have come to her with my mind, but I wanted the personal touch of flesh on flesh for this last and ultimate step of the plan.

  "You're free," I said as she turned from her window and looked at me, grinning her beautiful grin.

  She started toward me

  And then I was to learn just how lonesome and awful the role of a god can be. I was about to meet with my first near-disaster since I had claimed the power

  IV

  We were strangers.

  We had made love and been in love, had shared secrets and dreams. I had risked my life for her, and she had done the same for me, though in a different manner.

  And yet, I did not know her. She seemed like a crippled doll, speaking with the voice of some hidden puppet-master who was a terrible craftsman and who was even worse at writing dialogue for his wooden creatures to perform on stage.

  Everything she said seemed witless and stupid andperhaps most unforgivably of all-utterly boring. I could not understand how such, a woman could ever have interested me, even for the brief moments of lovemaking.

  Surely I had never been so anxious for the feel and taste of flesh that I had wooed and taken this creature in my arms! That seemed, now, like nothing more than animalloving-bestiality.

  In my arms, she was a pet

  And nothing more.

  Yet I knew what she had once been, and I understood that she could again be important to me. I was certain, all at once, that all that was required was a change of her personality, a growing up. I put her into the same suspended animation I had used with others, delved into her mind with my omnipotence and straightened out the quirks there, brought her swiftly to her full human potential.

  I woke her.

  And I sorrowed.

  Her full human potential was not enough.

  She was strikingly beautiful, filled with a sensuality that made my loins stir, that would make any man sit up and take full notice of her. She was the essence of femininity, full-breasted, round-hipped, and long-legged, with honey hair and wide eyes, Ml lips and quick pink tongue. But she was no more than that to me. Even a beautiful woman who outshines all other females is of no interest if her mind seems as sawdust and her words strike you as the rambling proclamations of an idiot.

  And so she seemed to me: an idiot, a thing, a moving construct of flesh. But not a woman I loved.

  "What's the matter?" she asked.

  "Nothing," I said. It pained me even to be forced to speak. Couldn't she understand me, without verbalizations? Couldn't she eke out even a hint of my thoughts without my having to spell them out for her in clean, crisp words and phrases?

  "Something is," she said.

  "Nothing."

  "You're so distant. I can't tell if you're really there or not."

  Oh, God, oh, God, I moaned to myself. But there was no use in that. It didn't help to pray to myself.

  "It's as if," she said, "it's not you inside there. Maybe Child has taken over. Maybe just a little part of nun has."

  "No," I said.

  "But if Child had taken you over, he would make you say that to satisfy me, wouldn't he?"

  I said nothing.

  "So maybe that's it."

  "No."

  I was very weary, very old.

  "Something, anyway," she said.

  "Yes. Something."

  "I haven't asked you how you got here? How did you shake the cops?" She was smiling through all of this, though her face belied her true feelings beyond those brightly flashing teeth.

  I did not answer her. I merely looked at her with a deep and melancholy sense of loss. And with a fear of the future that was to be mine from this day forth.

  I saw, now, why God had eventually lost all touch with reality, had stepped across the thin red line into utter madness. He had begun as a super-intelligent creature able to set the precarious movements of the universe in perfect harmony, able to structure the balance of all creation. But as time had passed, He grew introverted because of His lack of company. There was no one worthy of Him, equal to Him, and He had stagnated with this lack of personal conflict and motivations.

  The same would happen to me in time. It might require millennia, but it would happen all the same. Some day, I would whirl across the universe from one dark point to the other, insane, and babbling, my manipulatory mechanisms unable to harness the great psychic energy inside of me.

  "I think I'm afraid of you," she said.

  "I'm afraid of me too," I said.

  "What's happened?" she asked.

  But there was no sense telling her. There was no way to convey the absolute emptiness of the eternity that stretched before me. I had wanted a woman all my life, wanted to be loved and to return that affection tenfold. And now that I had finally shaken off all the false notions which had kept me from having a love-the false notions had come true and I was right back where I had started from.

  And there seemed no hope at all. It seemed I had lost her.

  V

  But I had not lost her.

  Even as I resigned myself to the future
that all gods must face, I realized how the problem could be resolved. I had not been thinking with the omniscience of a god, and now that I suddenly began to apply myself as fully as I could, an answer loomed immediately in sight. I should have realized that to God there are no insoluble problems.

  Why, then, had the previous God gone mad? Why hadn't He done what I was about to do to solve His loneliness? I thought I knew the answer to that one. He had not considered this utter loneliness to be a debit; perhaps He had not realized, as His existence had grown more petty and introverted, that what He needed was someone with whom to converse, exchange viewpoints and outlooks and mental visions. And by the time He had understood, it was too late: He was crazy.

  What I had in mind was singularly simple. I took her by the shoulders and drew her next to me, reached into her mind with all the force of my esp.

  She tried to fight.

  It was no good.

  I held her, and I funneled into her half the booming godly energy which I had contained, until the two of us were gods, each one half a god compared to the one deity before.

  Her mind burst with psychedelic visions.

  I fought down the rejection her own personality threw up, and helped her integrate the white power of godhood into her own being. We stood there for a very long while, locked physically and mentally as the changes came to her as they had come to me.

  And we parted.

  She took my hand, tenderly.

  We did not speak.

  There was no need for speech.

  Together, we left that room and that building and went forth to take command of the world. The altar candles would be lighted, the prayers of the multitudes begun, and the sacrificial lambs led to the butchering block.

  We passed many years on a perfect earth, racing from it to the corners of the universe. We saw all the places that had existed in the shattered mirror of God's mental analogue that time so long ago when I had confronted Him inside Child's mutant husk.