crude, externalized metaphor of the ineffable processes of our minds.'

All those obscure philosophy books were coming in handy now. He looked up at me with pleading eyes.

'Leave me alone. Give me back my nothingness.'

A voice shattered across the endless, carcass-strewn plain.

'

Who?

' it demanded to know. '

Who disturbs My perfect serenity? Who disturbs My eternal peace?

'

'Me?' I asked.

'

This is My dominion. All men come to rest here!

'

The little caretaker fearfully burrowed to hide under a woman's body that dripped a blackish goo. His terrified quivering shook the nearby corpses.

He

appeared.

He wore a doctor's outfit, entirely black. Even the mirror strapped to His forehead reflected ebon darkness from some hideous realm of shadow.

Glossy black gloves dripped blood in ceaseless vermilion rivulets.

I was in luck. He was only a few miles high this time.

'

All the creatures of the air and beasts of the sea

,' He said as if repeating a creed. '

All that walks and runs and crawls and breaths. All that lives or has lived. All come here and end. All things stop here. Nothing moves. This is rest. This is

Eternity.'

I gazed about unimpressed. 'Sort of like a Republican Convention, then.'

He didn't laugh. '

Even humor dies here

,' He said. He held His hands at His side so that the blood ran down His legs in stripes as wide as those of a hotel bellboy's.

'But things that die,' I said, 'return to the earth. They may decay, but they are consumed to become part of new life.'

'

Forget the earth. It too shall someday die.

'

'To become part of a new world.'

'All worlds shall end,' He droned on. 'The universe shall die.'

I took a gamble. It was a cosmological shot in the dark, but I had to try it.

'The universe shall die,' I agreed with a placating spread of my hands, 'and shall give birth to a new one.' By now I had almost forgotten the stench and the bodies surrounding us. I had Him on the defensive.

'

Forget birth. It is an illusion of the Moon.

Вы читаете The Jehovah Contract
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