or scarcity among the silver-haunted cloudscapes of fair Cimmeria, within the paradises of the dreaming? No more than will be when I am Saturn, and Time is mine. No matter how small my chance of success, surely the trial is worthy of attempt, since success will mean infinite bliss; and bounty, not merely for you, but for all creation, and peace as well with uncreation, the roaring rage of Chaos stilled, Saturn's black crimes undone! Is it not worth peace, peace between our peoples, peace to embrace Cosmos and Chaos both?'
'If peace is your goal, why all this killing?'
He smiled a crooked smile. 'Because the gods of other things cannot understand the swift thoughts of the god of quickness and quick-wittedness. Because I am misunderstood. Because the intelligent of this and every world are mistrusted by the slow of brain. Because I must pull up the roots of this old Cosmos, so ill-designed, to make the new world from its bones.'
She said, 'You cannot know it will work, can you?'
He laughed. 'Naturally, no one has disnatured all of nature before. Destroying and remaking all existence is unique, unparalleled. It is not something one can do in experiment beforehand.'
'Well, that's an interesting point of view. I don't want to sound like a naysayer, but: Would you hire a man to build a house who had no experience in house building? And a world is bigger than a house.'
'Who needs experience? I have theory!'
Vanity said, 'Um. Okay. Theory, huhn? Gee. Why don't you give me a little time to think this through? Come back in a year and a day, and we can discuss our marriage plans, and-'
'Lie me no lies. I know my children,' he snorted, 'for I am the Prince of Actors and Players, Lawyers and Orators and all who live by slyness. Why don't I kill you now, and finish the discussion when I resurrect the world? What is wrong for others to do, is not wrong for me.'
Trismegistus raised his wand, whispered a command, and all the deck to either side of him crackled and shivered with a black shadow that passed back and forth across it. The shadow scrabbled at the edges of the doorframe, but could not get in.
The swift god said, 'Ah, fair girl of Phaeacia, your race alone some power has that might confound Olympians in wrath. But I am mayhap more than mere Olympian. I have glanced all unafraid into the Chaos of Old Night; and Sable-vested Night stared back, not without love, on me; and so I know her secret lore, her occult craft and all-dissolving alchemy. I know how to unmake the boundaries of creation, and bash down the walls of time; the walls wherein your ratlike people gnaw their ratlike paths.'
The green grass in which the ship lay broken now all rippled, as if the land were a banner shaking into waves. The ground burst into confusion, while little hills of mud and snow and burning lava broke through the earth and shot up to every side. The cherry trees and all the little landscape were suddenly convulsed with whirlwinds of sticky mess.
The green stone in Vanity's hand flickered and lost its color. The gap of fourth- dimensional nonspace between the deck and the cabin evaporated. The laws of nature between the two spots equalized.
The black shadow of Trismegistus' magic snarled and leaped down into the trapdoor at Vanity.
She fell beneath its claws, bleeding, screaming, screaming.
Trismegistus pointed his revolver at where I crouched and shot a bullet through my head.
The empty shell of my head. The girl-shaped form of flesh on the deck, at that moment, was a mannequin, an empty outer garment I had carefully left behind me when I moved. It was hollow.
The gunshot broke it open like a clay pot.
I had not been twiddling my thumbs while Vanity chatted and bought me time. The initial stroke that paralyzed Victor and sent an azure-burning Quentin, smothering, to his face, all happened before I would move or blink.
But at the same moment when Colin was leaping, with his inspired and impossibly quick movements, onto the god (whose movements turned out to be even more impossible and even more quick), I had slid most of my mass into the fourth dimension and 'past' the deck into Victor's body.
My higher senses showed more details about the Swift God. Like a Hecatonchire, he was a fourth-dimensional being. But, where they were thick and blocky, expanding cones in the fourth dimension, he was slim and streamlined, occupying successively smaller and smaller cross-sections. They might be able to turn into giants, but he could turn into a pixie, or a dust mote.
And his geometry was bent the opposite way from mine. His space was Riemannian, where mine was Lobachevskian. Everything in four-space was farther away for me than it would have been through flat three-space; for him, everything was closer.
A ball of shortcuts through space-time was folded around him like an origami rose, confusing and complex to behold.
The spiderweb of moral strands I had seen around Mrs. Wren was nothing compared to the vast webwork I saw now circling the god of magicians, nets upon nets and fields upon fields, streaming away from him in each direction. There were ripples and glances of activity of some sort, furious and restless, pulsing through these webs. Like the eye of a storm, the fulcrum of all these webs was wound around the wand in his hand, so that no
