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 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 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
