I vaporized the glittering metal a.n.a.logues held in the fragments of mirror to my right. They disappeared without sound or light. I spread my hands, as in addressing the mult.i.tudes, 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 sh.e.l.l 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?" Morsf.a.gen 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!" Morsf.a.gen roared, turning on me, pointing with a hand that trembled uncontrollably.
"No," I said quietly.
"You"ll pay! d.a.m.n 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 G.o.d, 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 a.n.a.logues 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 s.e.x l.u.s.ts and its blood longings.
"Everyone grab him at once!" Morsf.a.gen directed, leading the others in on the bed.
The mutant thrashed wildly, pitched from side to side 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 a.s.sistance in its time of need. To the id, there was no such thing as a friend, and it acted accordingly.
Then it succ.u.mbed.
Quietly, like a sigh.
Motionless on the hospital floor, with smears of blood marking the s.p.a.ce 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 Morsf.a.gen 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 sh.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l-" Morsf.a.gen 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 G.o.d, and I could not make mistakes.
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 G.o.dhood-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 a.n.a.logue 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s tank whose exterior walls were more than three inches thick.
Between these outer pet.i.tions and the meat of the nut, there were thinner layers of gra.s.s along with fibergla.s.s 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 cl.u.s.tered in the rooms of the genetic engineering equipment, all of them busy. I reached out with my G.o.dly 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 G.o.dhood 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 Morsf.a.gen, 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, and that G.o.d was me*
I shattered the gla.s.s 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. Morsf.a.gen 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 G.o.dly power within me became further integrated with my own mind. And I knew there were no flaws in my plans.
A G.o.d 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 search 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 s.e.xual frustration turned into violence. I healed them like a prophet with the power of G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce.
Stars winked close at hand, warm and yet freezing, p.r.i.c.ks 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.l sat stupidly.
I rose up from the chair and left that room after turning Morsf.a.gen 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.