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.
