what I said.
She and I, we looked at each other. Then her soul and spirit blazed for one instant, visible and together, the full shape of her body over her, hair like wings, face expressionless or turned away from the earth forever, who can know, and then she was gone, risen, in a blinding light. I ducked from the light, then tried to see it again. But it was gone.
The body lay an empty sack.
The doors slammed shut.
The siren split my ears again.
The car roared into the stream, forcing other engines out of its path, people shifted and sighed and groaned around me. I stood stock-still on the pavement. Her soul was gone.
I looked up. Knees pushed against my leg. A foot came down hard upon my own. I wore the same kind of dirty string shoe as my enemy. I was almost toppled from the shallow curb.
The car was beyond my sight, and the Evals dead not a hundred feet away, yet no one here in this melee knew, so crowded was it, and I thought—without context, without reason—of what was said about Babylon after Cyrus conquered it, that funny remark which the Greek historian Xenophon had made, or was it Herodotus, that so big was Babylon and so dense with people that it took two whole days before people in the middle of the city knew that it had been taken at all.
Well, not me!
A man said, “Did you know who that was?” This was English, New York talk, and I turned just as if I were alive and I were going to answer, only there were tears in my eyes. I wanted to say,
“They killed her.” Nothing came out of my mouth but I had a mouth and the man was nodding as if he saw the tears. My God, help me. This man wanted to comfort me. Someone else spoke:
“That was Gregory Belkin’s daughter, that’s who that was,” the man said, “That was Esther Belkin.”
“Belkin’s daughter—”
“…Temple of the Mind.”
“Temple of the Mind of God. Belkin.”
What did these words mean to me?
“Gregory Belkin’s little girl, the Minders—”
Which way?
I began to fade. I felt it swift and terrible as it always is, as surely as if the Master had commanded all the artificial and gathered particles of me, as it is written,
“Azriel, stay alive!” came the voice from my mouth.
“Take it easy, son,” said the man beside me. And he looked at me as if he felt sorry for me. He lifted his arm to embrace me. I put my hand up. I saw the tears.
But the wind had come, the wind that comes for all spirits. I was losing my hold.
The man was looking for me and he couldn’t find me, and he didn’t know why, and thought it was his own confusion.
Then he and all those with him—and the great city—was gone too.
I was nothing now, nothing.
I struggled to see the crowd below, but I couldn’t find the spots where the Evals lay dead in their blood still or were being taken away with such care as the queen with her dark hair, the goddess who had died seeing me. She had said it, I heard it, she had said, “Azriel, the Servant of the Bones.” I had heard her as a spirit hears, though the man in the car with her might not hear something so small and tragic as her whisper.
The wind took me. The wind was filled with the wail of the souls, faces bearing down upon me, hands seeking to grip me, and turning my back on it as always, I let go. I saw the last dim outline of my hands for one instant; I felt the form of arms and legs; I felt the tears on my face. Yes, I felt that. Then I was a goner.
So there you have the picture! Masterless, risen, to witness this, to avenge it? Why? The darkness overcame me like a drug. Safe, yes, but I didn’t want to be safe; I wanted to find the man who had sent those Evals to kill her.
15
Time passed.
I felt it more intensely than usual. I knew that I was listening. I was there. I knew what the world was now, more or less, as always. Bear with me. I knew what men and women knew—those whom I’d seen and touched in the New York street.
The particulars made a moral impression. Emotion gradually accompanied the synthesis of knowledge. Ghosts don’t have to interpret Ghosts don’t have to be amazed, or shocked.
But the mind of the ghost, unfettered by flesh, can gather to itself indiscriminately and perhaps infinitely the sum of what is shared or valued by nearby human minds.
Awake once more in the darkness, I grasped the general and the spectacular—that we were nearing the end of the twentieth century of what men call the common era, that fossil fuel and generated electricity were indispensable to the everyday methods of eating, drinking, sleeping, communicating, traveling, building, and fighting, that micromachines of exquisite circuitry could store information in abundance, and that vivid moving pictures in which people appeared and spoke could be transmitted by waves or over tiny delicate fibers more precious than spun glass.
Waves. The air was full of waves. Full of voices speaking both privately and publicly—from telephones, through radios, televisions. The world was as fully surrounded by voices now as it was by air itself.
And the earth was indeed round. Not a mile of it remained uncharted, unowned, or unnamed. No part of it lay beyond communication because the mysterious waves of telephones, radios, and televisions could be bounced off satellites in space and back to earth again at any locale. Sometimes the television pictures and voices were of people and actions taking place at the very moment they were being transmitted: known as live TV.
Chemistry had reached unprecedented heights, achieving through extraction, purification, analysis, and new combinations all manner of new substances, materials, drugs. The very process of combining had been transformed so that there was now physical change, chemical change, chain reaction, chemical reaction, and fusion, to name but a few. Materials had been broken down and made into new materials and the process was without limit.
Science had surpassed the alchemist’s dreams.
Diamonds had found their way into the bits of drills, yet people still wore them as ornaments and they commanded millions of dollars, which was, apparently a preferred currency, American dollars, though the world was full of currencies and languages, and people from Hong Kong spoke to people in New York merely by pressing a few buttons. The catalog of synthetic materials and subsequent products had evolved beyond the memory or understanding of the common man so that almost nobody could define for you the ingredients of the nylon shirt he wore, or the plastic calculator in his pocket.
Of course some conclusions—even for me—were inevitable. A car or plane dependent on the combustion of fossil fuel can explode rather than move forward. Bombs can be sent without pilots from one country to another to destroy even the biggest cities with the highest buildings. Hardly anywhere in the world did the sea not taste just a little of gasoline.
New York was very far north of the equator, that was obvious, and one could say it was the capital, in this time, in the Western world.
The Western world. This is where I have found myself. And what is the Western world? Apparently, the Western world was the direct cultural legacy of the Hellenism of Alexander the Great, its concepts of justice and purity infinitely amplified and complicated but never really subverted by Christianity of varying kinds—from crude
