He spoke: 'Hermes Trismegistus am I, Lord of all the Hermetic and Hermeneutic Art; I command you and compel you, nude and unhoused spirit, die; I quench your demon heart.'
Phobetor fell out of midair as if struck by an arrow. He flopped to the deck, his wide bat wings beating blindly at the deck planks. He quivered, but could not get up. He was not dead yet, but the furry beast face he wore was drawn with pain; the green pinpoints of his demon eyes were extinguished; black smoke poured from his slack mouth.
At the moment that the blue flash of Cherenkov radiation had seared the skull of the Victor-dragon, Vanity had held up her green stone. I saw the edges of the trapdoor above us, the frame leading to the deck, recede in the fourth dimension, an accordion unfolding, while the three-dimensional distances and relations remained the same. Photons or matter entering the trapdoor frame would be teleported across time-space to the other side of the frame with no evidence of any change or delay. Even a yardstick shoved through the gap would feel no discontinuity. From either side, the picture of the other side remained the same. »
In the fourth dimension, however, the change was real; Vanity had just put the cabin where we both were far enough away from the landscape outside so as to give it a different set of natural laws. This was the first time she had done it right in front of me; I saw how the green stone actually operated.
It was fortunate, because the next thing the swift god did, after felling Colin, was to move (an invisibly swift wing-blur of motion) to the edge of the trapdoor, draw a revolver-yes, a good old-fashioned bang-bang-type firearm, very mundane and ungodlike: it was a .38 police service model-and shoot Vanity in the head with it.
The bullet lost interest in concepts like inertia and kinetic energy being proportional to the square of the velocity the moment it passed over the edge of the frame. The bullets bounced off Vanity's cheek and shoulder, stinging her about as much as thrown pebbles would have done.
The swift god said in a kindly voice, 'Ah, girl of Phaeacian blood, you have been happily raised far from the corruption of the Smuggler-court of the Queen of Thieves. She spurned my suit, but you favor her in look and spirit.
Come! I will spare you, if you open this door you slammed between us. I will make you my Queen, and we can rule the wreckage of the universe together. Eurymedusa just died, and I need a replacement busty bride! One of your art to be at my side! I ask only the life of the Chaos-beast there next to you, the one whose cross-section so closely mimics the shape of girl or goddess. I want her people to be at war with Cosmos too.'
Vanity said, her eyes like electric flame, her bosom rising and falling with angry breath: 'I don't marry murderers on the first date!'
His eyes lit up with inhuman, godlike mirth. 'Murderer? Me? Unmurderer, say rather, the one who will make murder as impossible as a five-sided square! Has no one told you how simple, how perfect, how crystalline pure my plan of plans? I intend the cure!'
She said, 'Cure for what?'
'For all! All people, all problems, all wants, fears, phobias, discontents, disorders, dissonance!
The panacea for the pancosmic all!'
'That's pretty large-scale thinking,' Vanity admitted, not taking her eyes from him. 'How?'
'I know what Saturn did; I know how to undo and redo his diddling. I thought my ladies told you: I told them to! I will kill you all and unmake the universe. Ah! What a misnomer that shall be: For there will be a second. The duo-verse shall be a universe as well, not merely existing, but being all that exists, all that ever will exist, all that ever had existed. Your deaths will not merely be unmade, but will be made never-to-have-been! My mission as guide of souls, as Psychopomp, as guardian of life and death, will be fulfilled more gloriously, more perfectly, than can be described, for death itself I will abolish. My role as lord of magicians shall encompass a Great Work greater than all workers of the art: The alchemy of all nature shall be transcended-all of base material nature be transmogrified to gold. Do you see? If you help me, I will resurrect you. You and all your friends. The new universe will not have a law of life and death: Other laws will obtain. In this world we have life, and that is all: In that world we will have glory, something above and beyond life!'
Vanity said, 'What did Prometheus do?'
The soaring manic exultation seemed to seep from the face of Trismegistus. It was as if he stumbled across a stone while in mid-dash. In a voice suddenly cold and flat, he snapped: 'What?
What question escaped the portcullis of your teeth?'
'What did Prometheus do to human beings? To make them half-divine?'
Trismegistus shrugged. 'Who knows? Who cares? Am I not his greater?'
'Then how can you remake them, in your new universe? How can you remake us?'
His eyes narrowed in anger, but his voice blazed up again like flame, quick, light, gay: 'Aha! We have a skeptic in our midst. I can end the war of Order and Madness by combining the best of both, establishing a harmony as Ouranos the all-creator should have done before time was born.
Is there death among the Nameless Ones of Myriagon? There shall be none here. Is there want
