She started toward me*
And then I was to learn just how lonesome and awful the role of a G.o.d 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-b.e.s.t.i.a.lity.
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, G.o.d, oh, G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed, 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 G.o.ds must face, I realized how the problem could be resolved. I had not been thinking with the omniscience of a G.o.d, 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 G.o.d there are no insoluble problems.
Why, then, had the previous G.o.d 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 G.o.dly energy which I had contained, until the two of us were G.o.ds, each one half a G.o.d 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 G.o.dhood 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 mult.i.tudes begun, and the sacrificial lambs led to the butchering block.
We pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d"s mental a.n.a.logue that time so long ago when I had confronted Him inside Child"s mutant husk.
There were worlds where trees grew ugly sores and bled on the ground.
There were worlds where the sky shattered around us, was resurrected a hundred times every hour.
We saw walking plants that had built civilization within the darkness of an alien jungle.
We saw stones that spoke and stars that felt real pain.
For ten thousand years, we roamed the corners of existence, learning what sort of kingdom we had inherited.
And one day, Melinda said, "I"m bored. I"ve seen it all."
"I agree," I agreed.
"Let"s revive religion," she said. "Let"s at least let the people know we exist. We can come to them in burning bushes and in talking doves, and at least that will be amusing."
"Sounds fine," I said.
And though we had ended the rivalries of religions, we went down to the earth and revived them. We brought forth temples and synagogues, churches and altars, and garish robes and bejeweled priests. We created hierarchies of worthless prelates, and we spoke our words to the ma.s.ses through the mouths of men of less value than most other men.
And for a time, that was fine, rather like camp culture.
But soon the novelty of it wore off-like camp culture too.
"I"m bored," she said.
"Me too."
"But what is left?" she asked.
"We could stir things up a bit," I said.
"Stir things?"
"A war or two. Some killings. We could take sides. You could command the Southern Hemisphere, and I the North. And the winner-yes, I"ve got it! The winner will be permitted to expend enough energy to create a new race of beings on some far-flung world!"
"Marvelous!" she said, clasping her perfect hands across the full, rounded b.r.e.a.s.t.s I had come to know so well.
We had long ago learned that the energy required to create a race of beings or to form a new planet was too much of a drain on us. We required five centuries of recuperation from such a task, and recuperation meant boredom-which we could not afford.
It was a grand prize, then.
And the wars began. They still rage, for she is a formidable opponent, though I do believe I will eventually whip her Hemisphere with a contingent of laser-weaponed soldiers I have been concealing in a state of suspended animation beneath the North Pole. They are members of the Canadian army, well-trained and deadly. She does not know of them.
We have a fine time.
We play our games, battling for the grand prize, both of us already imagining what interesting and grotesque race we could create if permitted the use of the power.
We have a fine time.
On earth, men die, thrown at each other by our machinations. Some fleeting moments, when I am waiting for her to make her move, I consider my origins: made of men. I consider my life and Harry Kelly and Morsf.a.gen and the lot of them. And then I consider what I am doing, and the old darkness in my soul returns. But not for long, of course. I am no fool. Morsf.a.gen is dead. The society we knew has fallen to newer ones. Harry is long ago gone. I barely remember what he looked like. So we play our games and forget our doubts. G.o.ds can have no doubts, as I said once before.
We play our games.
We have a fine time.