His face turned three shades of purple as He shouted, 'Christ didn't die for your sins! He died for
' He began to weep. 'What I did with the Flood was wrong. What I did to Sodom and Gomorrah was wrong. I'd violated My own commandment. Things weren't going the way I wanted, and I got angry. I said I was jealous.' He paused, staring at the floor. 'Doesn't it even things out that I let you kill My only Son? He died as Jesus and as Osiris and as Tammuz and as a dozen others. Won't you ever forgive Me?'
He looked at me with eyes that sagged under the burden of unbearable remorse. The tears rolled down His cheeks. He didn't bother to wipe them away.
I had to be merciless. I had gone too far to surrender to pity. How could you pity a God who had screwed up so monumentally?
'Every time a child starves to death,' I said, 'a mother discards her faith. Every time a crop fails, a farmer curses You. You've given us no reason to have faith in You. You tried to convince us that all we had to do was believe in You to be freed from the turning of the Wheel.'
'Don't,' He murmured. 'I beg of you.'
'You're scared of the Cycle of Birth, Life, and Death. You deny it and seek to force us to deny the reality all around us. When people pray to You to intervene and nothing happens, pain and suffering result. To retain Your power, You made suffering a virtue, and Your ministers of love and truth became torturers. They instilled virtue with racks and spikes when they could, or, when they couldn't, they resorted to the subtler torment of guilt and fear.'
He gave me a sour look. 'Dostoevsky does not become you. Give me something new.'
'Why? You never gave
anything new. You demand that we cease learning, that we repent of daring to know the difference between right and wrong, that we become fools again for You. You demand that we turn back the clock, reverse the Wheel, that we ignore Nature's laws while blindly obeying Your rules. You deny the existence of evolution, of change. You seek to rein in the Universe, when every natural inclination is to surge outward and up-'
'You're trying to assassinate me by talking me to death.'
I ground the cigarette out on the rug. It was time for the kill.
'I'm not talking You to death. I'm
You to death. I had to crawl into my mind and that of every man and woman on Earth to root You out. Intelligent people already deny Your existence because You demanded that they deny theirs. You've lost Your most powerful allies. For what?'
He pounded on the chair with both fists. 'Confusion to the enemy! I stopped Her!'
'You only slowed Her down. And You-Almighty God-couldn't kill Her.'
That deflated Him.
'No,' He said. 'I could not. She had the one power I could neither destroy nor duplicate.' He lowered His hands to His lap, pressing them together between His legs.
'We could not
without it. We were slaves in an uprising, and a futile one at that.' His left hand slid between the cushion and the chair.
'Perhaps what I do now,' He said, 'shall break the Wheel.'
His hand withdrew a pistol from under the seat cushion.
He raised the gun to His head.
And fired.
The shot reverberated in the small room for a long time, slowly expiring. There was an awful silence as one sometimes encounters in that place between dreams. I stared down.
Half His head lay on the floor. Inside the skull were neither brains nor blood. Only a cold, white mist that settled
