My arm reverberated with the force of the blow.
And he was gone, a vapor in the darkness, a phantom.
Holding the green glow of the weapon, I advanced slowly down the twisting halls toward the inner part of him, where his theories would bubble, where thoughts would run in molten rivers. I came out, finally, on an earthen shelf above a yawning pit. Far below, eternities away, drifting and glowing, was a circular mass, and the heat it threw into my face was great.
From here had come the Minotaur. From here came everything.
I reached out and grasped for anything, a subcurrent, a cracked image, the shell of a daydream, and I caught a Hate River ebbing and flowing.
HATE, HATE, HATE HATEHATEHATEHATE-HA-TE-HATEHATE
HATE? Somewhere in the middle of it, a two-headed thing swam, cutting the foul waters with a viciously spined neck. I caught the 'T' in HATE and traced it along the currents, searching. T leads ToThumb and a suckling mouTh? and The sucking mouTh suddenly To a brown nipple and a moTher's breasT? and again The T dominaTed? and I allowed The river To carry me ineviTably on Toward Theorem
Theory Through Tees? Through Thousand Times Tedious Tiring? Ten Times one Times Two To SubOughT- seven in drepshler Tubes now being used
The flood was too fast. I could see the theory, but I could not divert it fast enough toward the ocean in the distance where a waterspout whirled (taking the thoughts to the little bit of conscious mind he possessed). The thoughts that were now being spoken in dust whispers in a room far away-the thoughts being recorded by serious men with serious faces who listened, no doubt, quite seriously.
Then the drug must have finally taken hold of him, or I would have been swallowed alive by a mind construct and destroyed in his cauldron of insanity. The two-headed beast had swum near without drawing my notice. It caught my eye, now, as it moved swiftly, its mouth gaping, a giant cave that drooled
I lifted my sword as it raised its huge head above me to strike. Then there was a sudden, jerky slip like an old movie reel that has been spliced, and everything went into slow motion. It was like an underwater ballet. At that rate, it would have taken an hour for the beast's jaws to reach me and snap me up, and I slew him as his red eyes glistened and as a strange THRIDDLE THRIDDLE came out of his throat. Or hers.
Turning back toward the river, I directed thoughts toward the slow-moving waterspout until so much time had passed that I thought I had better get out before I lost my own character identity.
I turned away from the screaming Id pit.
I walked back the gray tunnel.
Cobwebs brushed my face.
But there were stairs leading upward this time
VI
There were candles in her green eyes, reflections of those on the table. The same flickering amber glinted from her hair, made the smooth flesh of her one bared shoulder glow with health. Her sequined, well-cut, Oriental something-or-other was dazzling.
'I'd want nothing held back,' she said over the remains of two Cornish game hens of that special diminutive and fleshy mutant strain. Bones and gravy contrasted with her loveliness.
'Nothing,' I assured her for the hundredth time.
We sipped the wine, but I felt giddy without it, and her flesh did not need any more glow than it had.
'All your feelings toward Artificial Creation, toward the FBI, and all the others who have used you.'
'That could be a blunt book.'
'Backing down?'
'Just making an observation.'
'Anything watered down would be a flop. Believe me, sensationalism sells a book.'
I remembered some passages from Bodies in Darkness and smiled and drank my wine and felt my face grow red.
The tape changed. The colored lights playing on the walls to either side ceased. Then a recording of Scheherazade came on, and the walls took on color again, spattered with orange, showered over with yellow, bursting with crimson along the baseboard.
She took her wine to the Plexiglas view deck that bubbled out from the east wall of the living room. She stood on the transparent floor of it, as if suspended above the side of the pine-covered mountainside. My mountain thrusts downward into a jumble of shattered rocks, falls off from there into the sea. White waves crashed against the stones below, and a dim echo of the ocean's agony reached us.
I walked after her, forcing myself to be calm, and stood next to her.
The moon was high and full and scarred. My guest was quite beautiful, flushed with its light, but she did not seem altogether real. A woman out of Poe or modeling herself after one.
'I keep thinking of Dragonfly,' she said, her eyes up there where it might be.
Toward the horizon a cloud drifted, gray against the purity of the sky. The storm had failed to materialize.
'Why do people enjoy ugliness so much?' she asked. It was such an abrupt change of pace that I was not able to cope with it. I shuffled my feet and smacked my lips at the wine I still held, and tried to think why people did that. She went on without me. 'There's all this beauty, and they try to make it ugly. They like ugly movies, ugly books, ugly news.'
By then, I was functioning. 'Perhaps, in reading about the worst parts of life, the terrible parts of reality seem more tame by contrast, more easily lived with.'
Her lips puckered, as if of their own volition, two separate strips of flesh, entities not a part of her body.
'Truthfully now,' she said, 'what do you think of my books? You say you've read them.'
I was thrown off balance. I had known a couple other writers, and I had never known exactly where criticism should stop and praise begin, exactly how much negative vibration they could take about their work. The last thing I wanted to do was insult or enrage this woman. 'Well ?'
'Truthfully,' she said, signaling me that maybe she was tougher than the other artists I knew.
'You mean? the ugliness in them?'
'Yes. Exactly.' She turned back to the ocean. 'I tried writing beautiful books about sex. I gave that up. It's the ugliness that sells.' She shrugged her shoulders. Amber hair danced. 'One must eat, mustn't one?' Another shrug.
Another amber jitterbug.
I was overly aware of the tightness of her bodice.
With the soft light on her face, the vista of the pines and ocean framing her refined beauty with their own rugged majesty, I wanted to grasp her, to draw her to me, hold her, kiss her. At the same moment I felt myself gripped by that desire, I experienced a counter-emotion, a disgust and a deep fear. It was connected to The Fear, to the wombs, to the first moments of my conscious life when I first knew what I was-and what I wasn't.
I brought a hand to that bare shoulder, felt her flesh, resilient and warm, scintillating beneath my fingers.
I took my hand away, breathless and confused.
Turning from her, I began to pace the room, holding my wine glass so tightly that it must surely soon snap in my fingers. I examined the original oil paintings on the walls, as if I were looking for something, though I could not guess what. They had hung here so long that I knew their every detail. There was nothing new in them, not for me.
What did I fear? What about her terrified me so much that I could not bring myself to complete the advance I had made, to draw fingers downwards from her shoulder, to touch the thinly sheathed roundness of her breasts? Was it only what the computerized psychiatrist in the den told me it was-? Was it only that I feared making too many contacts in the world and then discovering that I did not belong? It seemed to me that it ran deeper than
