by Dean Koontz
"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 assistance 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 anticipated."
"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 butt 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.
"Sexless bastard!" I hissed.
"Larry," he called to the young soldier. The boy stepped forward, holding his rifle ready. Morsfagen 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 butt 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, Morsfagen 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?" Morsfagen 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 godhood I had been seeking all my life...
* * *
FOUR
Man As God...
I
I touched the sheen of His mental surface, drew back from the cold, humming tune of ultimate power.
In the darkness of the empty conscious mind, I hovered over the bending amber shell, slid along its eternal curve toward the horizon which always danced just beyond my grasp. In time, I found the weak spot on that amber smoothness, saw the moving shadows of things beneath, of things in the id and ego below. I pried at that weak spot, slit it open, sailed through and into God's mind...
Imagine:
Imagine the largest mirror in the universe, a million light-years from edge to beveled edge (no matter who the artisans were who created such a marvel, it is only the mirror itself which engages us). On such a great glass, there would be literally countless millions of visions, bits and pieces of colorful landscapes and peoples, events and futures and pasts and even moments of sundry presenttunes. Further imagine a cosmic hammer as large as a star (again, we care not of the men who forged that instrument, but only of its actions) brought to bear on the very center of that fantastic mirror. And then imagine the flying shards of silvered glass clattering down, down, down into the bottom of Existence, to the end of Time, and there to lie in pools of pitch blackness with their wild reflections frozen in them.
This was the mental landscape inside of Child this time, far different from what it had been. It was a mind of superhuman dimensions, fractured into near uselessness, the mind of God, the Being who had made the Earth, the galaxy, the universe, and each of us in it, the god who had forged the first DNA and RNA and begun the craziest dream ever. And yet it was the most disorganized place I had ever seen-disorganized and brilliant at the same moment, wilder, stranger, more fearful than any mind I had seen in all my years of head-tripping.
I settled through glazes of amber... ... through ice spicule clouds the color of freshly spilled blood... ... through a fine blue fog and finally down into the smashed visions of this mad universe...
For a while I hung there, feet of my analogue body inches above a glittering shard of stars. Then I touched bare toes on galaxies and walked across the ruined skies to another fragment, this a jungle scene with strange birds and stranger ambulatory plants. I seemed to settle down into the jungle, to become a part of it, though the moment I wished to go on I ceased this empathy and rose until I stood above it, looking down on it-and looking out on the millions of other scenes awaiting me on the flat black table of nothingness.
I set out, searching for the core of God, for the shattered glass that held Him.
He could not be far.
Wasn't God everywhere?
I walked through a place of flowers where the earth was as thick as water reeds with boles as large around as two men could link their arms. The leaves were high overhead and did not allow even a minim of sunshine through.
I walked through a place of flowers where the earth was carpeted with an explosion of ripe colors, where clouds of spores rose and swept by me as their season came, where seeds stuck to my analogue body from the sappy tendrils of man-sized milkweed plants.
I saw a red sky with a blue sun, and the land was parched and empty beneath both.
Twice as I wandered, I felt His onrushing presence, the huge power of His disabled mind. I reached out, grasping blindly for Him, but He was gone in the instant, leaving me groping and frustrated.
Several times, the sky itself came screaming down, compressing the air beneath it until my analogue body threatened to explode. The sky shattered around me, was resurrected as flocks of blue-white birds, and rose again to hang high over everything.
The earth rose and fell like a beating breast, the vibrations of the heart muscle coursing through me.
There were creatures with many eyes, others with more legs than I could count.
Dead birds fell from the sky by the tens of thousands, became lizards when they struck the earth, climbed the rocks about me, grew wings, and entered the clou
ds again.
There were places where the trees wailed and broke open with ugly sores, bled as if they were made of flesh.
The dripping blood became crimson pebbles where the tree touched the earth.
I stalked through this chaos, searching.
At last, I came upon Him where He was desperately trying to coalesce into an analogue form with which He could contact me. He was a smoky, bluish pillar of psychic energy, roiling, tumbling, spitting sparks of many colors, at last jelling into the shape of a man: Buddha.
"It is a wise man who knows how to compromise,"
Buddha said, rubbing His large bare belly and smiling down at me. He towered twenty feet into the air.
"I will not compromise," I said.
"The seven lives-"
I pushed on. "I will not compromise." I extended fingers of my own psychic energy, and felt out the core of God, seeking for the pattern to its structure.
The figure shifted, became an image of Jesus Christ.
"Truly, I say unto you, a man who recognizes his own mortality is a happier man. A man who comes to live with his weakness with all humility is a man destined for my kingdom."
I grasped Jesus' neck with psychic hands and throttled Him.
He exploded, whirled into a column of energy, a furious, storming energy that longed to strike out at me but could not. Power is useless without a mechanism to harness and control it, and His mechanism had long ago deteriorated beyond the point of effectiveness. God was a hugely powerful pool of psychic energy without a manipulatory system: a car without wheels.
I reached with my own mental tendrils, and oblivious to the halfhearted and misdirected weapons He brought to bear against me, also oblivious of His pitiful pleading, I threaded him. He wanted to maintain His power, even though He was insane, and I could not make Him understand that it was time for a new God.
He wriggled and twisted in a vain attempt to pull free of me.
As I encircled Him, I knew that God had been insane long before Child had ever approached Him, had been a raving and incoherent mass of energy for-perhapsmillennia. All mankind's faiths had failed to understand the basic reason for chaos, for blind violence and hatred.
We had attributed all the bad things of this world to "divine tests" of man's will and courage. But all of that was a theological falsehood, for the force energizing the universe was madness, not reason; insanity and not mercy. The madness had reached even the smallest particle of His being, aged like wine into the purest elements of horror.
Here died Jesus.
And Mohammed.
Here died Buddha and Yahweh.
But it was not all a loss.
For here, at last, I was born in my new image, to replace half a thousand false gods.
Burn the old altars and prepare new ones. Council your children with different commandments and slaughter the freshest of your lambs so that I may taste their blood in the morning dew.
I bled His energy away just as I might have tapped a dynamo or a battery, distributed it through my own psychic power until He was no longer a separate entity but merely another area of my own mind, as Child now was, another rising bank of power cells to draw upon for the creation of miracles. Not a shred of His personality or self-awareness remained; for all purposes, He had diedor had been transubstantiated, which was all the same now. His memories had been evaporated, and only the magnificent white brilliance of His power remained, condensed, purified, and made ready for use. For my use. It was now, after all, my power.
I had killed God, quite simply, just as I had killed Child some days before.
I felt no remorse.
Does one feel remorse when one shoots down a maniac who is wielding a gun in a crowded department store?
Man as God. I retained the mortal form and the mortal outlook, with the emotions and the prejudices of men. I did not think that would be a weakness, but that it might actually make me a more benevolent and stable deity than the previous owner of my power had been. Man as God...
I vaporized the glittering metal analogues held in the fragments of mirror to my right. They disappeared without sound or light. I spread my hands, as in addressing the multitudes, and eliminated all the other pieces of that "cosmic mirror.
There was total darkness drawing down about me like an oiled curtain.
I made light.
With the light, I fashioned stairs leading upward into further regions of darkness.
I walked out of there, erasing the stairs behind me.
Outside, the world awaited me, unknowing but soon to learn...
II
When I returned to my own body, carrying the power with me, the first thing I saw was Child's mutant shell convulsed with a series of hideous spasms that made it look much like the flickering, shape-changing image in a funhouse mirror. It sat straight up in bed, quivering like the shaft of an arrow. Its eyes were wide for the first time, the pulsing veins visible in the whites. Its slitted mouth worked furiously, though no words issued from it, no sounds at all. It scrabbled at its chest with two bony hands, clawed at its horrible face so viciously and persistently that blood seeped from the long red welts it carved in the flesh there.
The doctor attending the mutant grabbed it and attempted to force it backward onto the mattress, where restraining straps could be applied. But it heaved the white-smocked figure aside as if the man were so much paper, in an exhibition of strength that no one could have expected from such an emaciated body, from such skinny arms and powerless hands.
A dry rasping-hacking sound emanated from the creature's throat, but no words formed. It could have been tissue ripping under some unimaginable inward pressure rather than a conscious exercise of vocal cords.
"What's going on here?" Morsfagen demanded, rising from his chair with that slow, powerful, and somehow contemptible grace of his, cutting air like a sail.
The soldier named Larry came across the room, looking confused but determined. He dropped his rifle, and reached for the mutant. The creature snapped at him, sunk teeth into his wrist, and made blood fountain up brightly. The soldier screamed, struck at the mutant's face, smashed the jawbone. The mouth relaxed, released him, but the mutant was still awake, still struggled to gain control of itself and of the situation it found itself in.
"You did this!" Morsfagen roared, turning on me, pointing with a hand that trembled uncontrollably.
"No," I said quietly.
"You'll pay! Damn you, you'll see the woman raped for this, you'll see her humiliated!"
I could not even summon up the slightest bit of disgust for him. I looked with the eyes of the man I had been, but with the judgment of a god, and I could do no more than pity him. In a way, I resented my benevolence. I had longed for the power to strike back with thunder and with lightning. But now that the time had come, I found him deserving of scorn and pity more than wrathful vengeance.
"What is wrong with him?" he asked, shoving his broad face square into mine.
I knew exactly what was happening with Child's husk, though the rest of them could never possibly strike upon the truth. When I had left that shell, I had momentarily forgotten something which I should have remembered.
There was still one portion of Child's mind down there in the black waste of his body: the id. All those scorpion analogues which I had dispersed in the ice-floored subterranean cavern so long ago were now risen up and in command of the mutant flesh. Normally the most directly impotent of the mind's factions, it now reigned without control, without opposition. But the id alone was not a functioning consciousness and could never hope to control the body: the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome was a complete impossibility, something that could only exist in fiction. The mutant husk would die now, days after its mental expiration, with the scorpion-clawed id seeking control to gratify its sex lusts and its blood longings.
"Everyone grab him at once!" Morsfagen directed, leading the others in on the bed.
The mutant thrashed wildly, pitched from side to si
de of the bed. Finally, it grasped the rails and clambered against them, flung itself over the side. It crashed onto the floor with a sickening crunch of flimsy bones, biting at the air, spitting blood across the tiles, clawing and weakly kicking at anyone who tried to bend to it, or to give it assistance in its time of need. To the id, there was no such thing as a friend, and it acted accordingly.
Then it succumbed.
Quietly, like a sigh.
Motionless on the hospital floor, with smears of blood marking the space around it, it seemed more like a squashed insect than the ex-home of a human creature.
They stared at the corpse for a long while, transfixed, perhaps, by its inhumanness. Then Morsfagen turned to look at me with the malevolence I had once despised.
"You killed him," he said matter-of-factly, beyond hatred now. He turned to the soldier named Larry. "Arrest him. Get that bastard out of my sight!"
Larry lifted his gun, grinning. He enjoyed using it too much. As he advanced on me like a homicidal maniac, I began to think that even the mindless shell of the mutant had been more human that this boy. Behind those eyes, there was something a little less than a man.
"Stop where you are," I said.
But he did not, of course.
I reached out for him, touched him, took him. His face went utterly blank, and he ceased his advance.
"What the hell-" Morsfagen began.
With other esp fingers, I touched the minds of everyone in that room and delivered them into a state of sleep which was not quite sleep, closer to death but not quite death. There, they would be far out of my way so that I might concentrate on the work ahead. Cautiously, I entered their minds with an ability I had never had before: neither in scope nor in power. I spread out their lives, their neuroses and psychoses, and I carefully untangled the knots that had warped each man and woman's psyche over the years. When they woke, they would be emotionally and mentally stable for the first time. The old fears and worries would no longer plague them, and their personalities (which had been structured all their lives to nurture the needs which were produced by those fears and worries) would be drastically reshaped. But for the better, surely-for the better. I was God, and I could not make mistakes.