their glasses like a demented android bartender. Conversation had sputtered out long ago. The lights of San Francisco across the way were beginning to go off. It was probably two, three, four in the morning.
There were vines creeping across the windows, now. Big, snaky vines, thick as his arm, with little octopoid sucker pads on them, and heavy clusters of leaves. Everything was turning green. A green mist filled the air outside. A light, steady rain, green rain. The West Coast drought had magically ended and the San Francisco Bay Area was part of the global greenhouse now, rich and rank with tropical growth.
Carpenter looked out the window, peering between the greenery. The overnight transformation was astonishing. A green light was playing on the hillside. He saw vines everywhere, creepers, gigantic ferns, enormous unfamiliar shrubs with colossal gleaming leaves and great swollen gaudy flowers. It was a berserk garden, magical, yes, but the magic that had been at work here was a dark and evil one. Unending rain was falling, and the plants stirred and murmured beneath it, expanding moment by moment, rising and stiffening, spreading their wings.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said to Rhodes, and they stepped through the sealed windows and floated easily downward into the moist green world beyond.
It was a luminous world, too. Eerie foxfire burned in it, a universal pallid flickering glow. The air was thick, wet, sickly-sweet. Everything seemed to be coated with fur. No, not fur, fungus of some kind, a dense damp growth of mold. From swollen organs burst periodic clouds of dark spores that sought and quickly found tiny crevices where they might take hold and sprout. There were no sharp edges visible anywhere, no bare surfaces: everything was overgrown. The trees, enormous and overbearing, had a lumpy, bearded look. They bulged with bewildering knobs and knurled excrescences.
The moon glimmered faintly through the mists. Lashings of wild mutant bamboo crisscrossed its pockmarked face. Green blood dripped from it across the sky.
Figures moved in the mist—trolls, strange boneless shapeless tentacular beings, alien and monstrous, that might have been natives of some other star; but as Carpenter came closer to them, he saw their faces, their eyes, and he could read the humanity that was in them. The staring stricken eyes, the gaping horrified mouths. And the scaly skins, the slithery limbs, the sagging pudding bodies, the alien forms surrounding the embedded nucleus of humanity still visible within. They too had undergone a magical transformation in the night.
Nick Rhodes seemed to know them all. He greeted them the way one would greet neighbors, friends. Introduced Carpenter to them with a cheerful wave of a tentacle.
“My friend Paul,” he said. “My oldest and dearest friend.”
“Pleased to meet you,” they said, and passed onward through the mist, the green rain, the forest of shaggy trees, the clouds of furry spores that filled the humid air.
Dangling festoons of ropy vines covered every building. Lunatic vegetable life ran riot under a cinnamon sky. Carpenter could make out, under the whips and cords and ropes of the sprawling vines, the indistinct shapes of the ruins of the former world, lichen-stained pyramids, shattered cathedrals, marble stelae inscribed with unreadable hieroglyphs, the fallen statues of gods and emperors. At an altar drenched in green blood a sacrifice was taking place, a crowd of tentacled beings clustered solemnly about one of their own kind who was bound to a stone slab by furry ropes. A furry green knife rose and fell. Carpenter heard distant singing—it was chanting, really—all on a single note, “Oh oh oh oh,” like a gentle, blurry far-off cry of inexpressible pain.
“How long has it been this way?” he asked Rhodes. But Rhodes merely shrugged, as though his question had no meaning.
Carpenter stared. The world he had known, he realized, was lost forever. The Earth of mankind was dying, or already dead, its long history over: now it was the turn of the funguses and the slime molds, the vines and the bamboos. The jungle would cover all of the works of man. And mankind itself would fade away into that jungle, a tribe of haunted, hunted creatures, hiding from the groping tendrils, seeking out pitiful niches of safety for themselves in the midst of this wild efflorescence of the new creation. But there would be no safety. Eventually the last humans would transform themselves into a vegetable species also, filling their mouths with the new spores and giving forth a generation of unimaginable new creatures.
What of us? he wondered. Those of us who have not yet changed, who still walk about in our animal forms, our rigid bones and our old human skins? Is there no place for us? Must we be swallowed up in the general disaster?
He looked past the bamboo-bound moon, toward the unreadable sparkle of the stars.
There, Carpenter thought. There: a new rebirth in the stars, that’s our only hope. There. There. We shall walk up off the Earth into the sky, and we shall all be saved. Yes. While the mutilated Earth regenerates itself without us.
“Look,” Rhodes said, pointing toward the bay.
Something immense was rising from it, a solid massive column of green topped with eyes, an unthinkable unknowable being. Water streamed from its shoulders and fell in sizzling clouds back into the bay. Its eyes were huge, irascible, overwhelming. Rhodes was down on his knees, and he was gesturing to Carpenter to do the same.
“What is it?” Carpenter asked. “That thing—what is it?”
“Get down and acknowledge,” Rhodes whispered fiercely. “Down and acknowledge!”
“No,” said Carpenter. “I don’t understand.”
But all the world was bowing to the thing from the waters. A great music was swelling upward and filling the heavens. A new god had come, the overlord of this altered world. Carpenter, despite himself, felt moved by the grandeur and the strangeness of the scene. His knees weakened. He began to lower himself to the moist spongy ground.
“Acknowledge,” Rhodes said again. And Carpenter closed his eyes, he bowed his head, he moistened the damp earth with his tears. In wonder and incomprehension he acknowledged the world’s new master; and the vision passed, and he awoke, sober and aghast, with the first gray light of morning creeping into the room. His head was pounding. There were empty bottles everywhere. Nick Rhodes lay sprawled on the floor near the couch. Carpenter pressed his hands to his throbbing temples, and rubbed and rubbed in the vain hope of pressing the pain out of them, and listened to the dull tolling sound of his own mind telling himself in bleak and utter conviction that there was no hope for the poor weary damaged old world, none, no hope whatever. All was lost. All, all, all. Lost, lost, lost. All. Lost.
All. Lost. Lost.
Lost.
An enzyme bath, a leisurely day of lounging about the apartment, an hour or two spent in Rhodes’ spindizzy chamber getting all the kinks steamed out of his nervous system for the time being, and Carpenter felt almost functional again. Rhodes seemed to show no ill effects at all from his night of bingeing. About five in the evening Isabella Martine appeared, once again very amiable and solicitous and nonirritating, and after some sherry and a little light conversation the three of them went over to Jolanda Bermudez’s place north of the campus.
Carpenter was amused and pleased by the overwrought splendor of the little house—its baroque, antiquated external appearance, the multitude of small rooms within, all jammed with myriad preposterous artifacts, the drifts of incense in the air, the horde of cats, every one of them of some strange and elegant breed. It was just the sort of house, faintly ridiculous but full of eccentric vitality, that he would have expected Jolanda to have, only more so.
And Farkas, the eyeless Kyocera man that Jolanda had somehow collected along the way, up there in the L-5s—he seemed to fit right in with the rest of her things. A curio, an artifact, a one-of-a-kind.
You could not fail to be impressed by him, Carpenter thought. Enormously tall: a powerful, commanding figure, radiating self-assurance and strength, practically filling the little room where Jolanda was serving them canapes. Fine clothes, pearl-gray suit and orange foulard, boots polished to a mirror finish: high-level dandyism. Massive cheekbones, jutting chin. And above all that high smooth arching forehead, that mesmerizing expanse of blank skin where everybody else had eyebrows and eyes: a freakish monstrous thing, something out of a dream, something you never expected to see in real life. Not simply blind, but completely eyeless; and yet nothing in Farkas’s movements gave any indication that his vision was at all impaired.
Carpenter cautiously sipped a drink, nibbled a canape. Watched the changing scene.
Curious social patterns formed, held a moment or two, broke. People shifted, floated about the room.
Farkas and Enron—a huge lordly man and a small, tense, tightly coiled one—conferring in low voices in a far
