by Dean Koontz
Sams mind whirled in a nighmare landscape of doubt and nearly unconquerable mountains of unbelief. "And the machines were not machines at all, for God is not the Father of the machine. God is the Father of life, the Father of man who makes the machines. God could imitate the exterior of a machine, but the only way He could make it work was to create a life form-the jelly-mass-to imitate the workings of one. He knows us, physically, but He doesnt know what we have within us."
"And God feared machines because they were something above His abilities. He feared the Mues and chose to ignore their existence in your training because they were things beyond His powers-the results of men usurping His rights."
"A thousand years," Breadloaf muttered.
"How could you stand it?" Gnossos asked, turning from the Shield. "How could you sit there, knowing?"
"Sometimes, after I had left here and gone into the streets and smelled the fresh air, I thought I could never come back. But when I thought of how much worse it would be if He ever escaped..."
"Of course," Gnossos said sympathetically. "For a thousand years, men have grown gradually saner, have broken communications with their barbaric past. Its all because Hes been trapped in your warped dimension tank and cant influence anything. Isnt that it?"
Breadloaf sighed. He was able to make fists of his hands now, and he sat exercising them. "Thats it exactly. My father thought he could enslave the Prisoner and make Him work for the family. We knew who He was. He wasted no time in telling us that, in demanding to be set free. But we could not master Him. It became clear that we could never let Him out. At first, of course, it was for the familys safety. He could, and would, wipe out every Breadloaf. Then, after a few hundred years, when we saw what the empire was becoming, how much better it seemed, how much saner were the councils of man, we realized that much of the ugliness of life had been Gods doing. We had even stronger reasons for keeping Him locked up. If He were ever released"-Breadloaf wriggled an arm at last-"war would come again. Famine as we have never known it. Pestilence. Disease. We have but one choice: keep Him contained."
"Correction, please. You have no choice but to release Him!"
The voice drew their attention to the door. A man stood there-a Christian judging from his beard. There were a dozen others standing behind him, dirty, unshaven, dressed in the rags of self-denial. One of them was the sign-carrier Gnossos had argued with in the streets what seemed like an eternity ago. He was smiling now, sans sign. He stepped into the room. "Isnt it strange whom God should choose as His liberators?"
"How did they-" Breadloaf began, struggling against his stiff body.
"I told them!" Sam shouted. The series of hypnotic orders flashed through his memory now. What God had ordered him to do was a burning clarity. He recited the posthypnotic commands that had followed their landing on Hope: "Find a temple and tell the Christians that God is being held prisoner by the Breadloaf family in the Breadloaf Building; I will give you flames upon your tongue as a sign to convince them. In a Sell-All Hardwaremat, purchase these chemicals and pieces of equipment: ester of glycerin, nitric acid, a watch, a spool of number twenty-six copper wire, and a small construction detonator. Next prepare a bomb of glyceryl tinitrate. Next, break into the Breadloaf Building, plant the bomb by force pump A3A45 in the basement. Next, render Alexander Breadloaf III helpless via drug darts." He had told the Christians then. They were here on his word.
"It isnt your fault," Gnossos said.
Then the echo of an explosion rumbled through the floors of the building, shook the walls. The Christians were destroying the machinery that maintained the Shield. They were planting new bombs to do what Sams first one didnt have a chance to do.
A second explosion rocked the floor even more violently...
And the Shield blinked...
... was gone...
Breadloaf screamed a piercing scream, a thing that he had only half finished with when the black bird with the forty million eyes and the claws of brass swept from the vacant spot in the wall, swooped out on the cold winds and descended on him. The room had expanded, it seemed, to the size of a dozen galaxies. The room was erupting on the way to becoming the macrocosm itself. Yet all of it was filled with them and this thing from beyond their dimension so that it seemed, in another and confounding way, that the chamber had shrunk to the size of a small closet.
There was no up or down.
The stars had lost their glitter and consumed themselves.
With a tongue of sequined pebbles, the darkness ate the light.
Sam was tumbling around within and yet without God, smashing against the pinions of the tremendous feathers, caught alternately in winds as cold as ice and as hot as volcano hearts. On and off, as he fought the crushing expanses of blackness that clutched at him with a million oiled talons, he saw Alexander Breadloaf. He saw him first without skin-peeled and bloody. Next he saw him blackened and a thing of ash. The ashes became other dark birds that bored into the belly of the omnipotent black bird and revitalized it with their frenzy. He saw lightning flashing from Breadloafs charred nostrils and worms eating the mans black tongue. He saw him undergo all the punishments of all imagined hells. And he feared greatly the moment when God would turn on the rest of them, come with claws and with fangs to eat out their livers with His silver-plated teeth.
Feathers sprouted from Breadloaf, black feathers that were oily and bent. With His beak, the thing that was God plucked the feathers from the man, leaving gaping holes that seeped yellow...
There was no warmth; neither was there cold.
Everywhere was fear.
Then, abruptly and without announcement, there were words in his mind. They were Hurkos familiar tones: Listen. Listen to me. I can see Him. I can see God!
I can see Him too! Sam thought-screamed.
No. I mean, I can see Him with my psionic powers. There is nothing to Him! Hes so damned small!
Clarify yourself! This was from Gnossos.
He is puny. He is not large and forceful. The room is not expanding. Breadloaf is not being charred or eaten by worms. God is trying to frighten Breadloaf to death. Fear and illusions are the only weapons He has left. He has lost His greatest powers. Perhaps from centuries of confinement and the last surge of energy needed to create Sam. He is drained.
But all this, Sam thought.
A damn fake! Ill send you the true picture. Im looking, directly through His illusions and delusions. I can see. Ill broadcast.
In an eye blink, the room was normal. Breadloaf was uncharred. But he was dead. His eyes were blank, fish-belly things. His hand clutched his chest above his heart. The tiny transmitter in his heart would be yelling for the medics. He would be reached in time-here in the city-to be given a new heart before brain damage occurred. He would live again.
"Where?" Gnossos asked.
Then they saw it. It was poised on the rim of the Shield itself. It was a small, pink, formless thing. It had not refrained from transferring itself simply because it was too big. It had sent Sam first for the simple reason that Sam would be more effective than it would have been. For a moment the dreams surged back, but Hurkos used his own, greater powers to fight them away. Then the Mue raised a chair, smashed it into the pink slug. Again, again, and again. He mashed with a fury that Sam would not have guessed him to possess.
And Hurkos killed God.
* * *
XI
Breadloaf came through the door of the saloon, stopped a moment to search them out, then smiled as he sighted them. Only seven hours had passed since he had died, but he looked healthy and cheerful. More cheerful, in fact, than they had ever seen him look. He made his way through the crowd, nodding to friends, stopping now and again to shake hands with those who were oblivious to his recent adventure. Finally he reached their table, sat down. "I passed the church on the way. The Christians are moving out of their homes in the basements, bundles on their backs. In a way, its a shame. Their lives have am
ounted to nothing."
"They can take the shots now," Hurkos said. He was relaxed for the first time in a long, long while. He had gotten his revenge, more revenge than any man could hope for. Sam had wondered, at first, if Hurkos could be deranged, for he had, after all, killed. But he had not killed a man. Therein lay the key. What he had killed was a rung lower than Man, really, therefore an animal. "They can live eternally."
"Some of them probably will. But they are old, remember. Fifty, some sixty, while the rest of us are thirty or under. It will not be completely pleasant to be eternally near-old in an age of eternal youth."
"Tragic and ironic," Gnossos said, sipping his drink. "How do you feel?"
"Better than ever," Breadloaf answered punching the robotender for drinks and trying unsuccessfully to ward off Gnossos hand as it thrust coins into the machine.
"I guess so," Hurkos said. Then: "Gnossos, I killed God tonight. Hows that for an epic poem?"
"Ive been thinking," the poet said. "But it would have been better if He had been a Goliath. There is nothing particularly heroic about smashing a helpless slug to pulp."
Sam finished his drink, set the glass down. "Im going for a walk," he said, standing. "Ill be back in a while." Before anyone could speak, he turned for the door, struggling through the crowd, and stepped outside. Night was giving way to day; a touch of golden dawn tinted the horizon already.
"You all right?" Gnossos asked, stepping out beside him.
"Im not sick, if thats what you mean. Not exactly."
"Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean."
"The purpose of life: to overcome your creator."
"But what can a walk do? Me? Im getting drunk."
"Yeah," Sam said slowly. "But you know that wont work. Maybe Ill get drunk too, later. But now Ill walk."
"Want me to come along?"
"No."
Sam stepped off the curb and into the cobblestoned street. The ways here were twisted, for the aesthetic quality was supposed to be reminiscent of an old Earth city-though much cleaner and far more efficient. He found streets that tangled in on themselves, twisted through tree-dotted parks and between quaint old buildings. With him were memories of the chamber beyond Breadloafs office wall, pictures of cold emptiness. He could still feel the cool breeze rippling through his hair from the gaping, empty tank.
He walked past the park where the lake stretched away in the distance. There was a gentle slapping of its waves against the pilings of the free-form walkway that bridged its shallower portions. There was the sound of fish jumping now and again. Somewhere a dog barked. And in his mind, there were questions.
Who was he?
What had been his past?
And where-oh, where!-was he bound?
* * *
TWO: SOULDRIFT
And men shall be torn between the old way and the new...
(Compiled from several entries in the diary of Andrew Coro)
* * *
I
Long ago, shortly after my mothers blood was sluiced from the streets of Changeover and her body burned upon a pyre outside of town, I suffered what the psychologists call a trauma. That seems like a very inadequate word to me.
To understand this "trauma," one should know some of the events that preceded it. The townsfolk came in the middle of the night and took her, decapitated her, stuffed a cross cut from stale bread into her dead mouth, and charred her on fire fed by the boughs of a dogwood tree. I was five years old at the time.
Those were the days when men still killed, before Hope sprang up as the capital of our galaxy and pushed forth a society where no man killed another man, where sanity ruled. That was a thousand years ago, a century after Galactic War I, before Eternity Combine gave us immortality. And worst of all, that was Earth. The rest of the galaxy was staggering to its feet, aware that something had gone amiss in the great chauvinistic dreams that had dominated for so many hundreds of years. Hope was an idea born in the brighter minds, a last possibility for the survival of what Man should be, a dream of kinglessness, of Utopia unmarred, a last chance but the best chance ever for mankind. Yet Earthmen were still hunting witches.
To hide me from those who would destroy me because my mother was a mutant who could lift pencils (only pencils and scraps of paper!) with her mind, my grandparents locked me in a closet of their house. Smells: mothballs, old rubber rainshoes, yellowed magazine paper. Sights: dark ghosts of wools and cottons hanging about, imagined spiders scuttering viciously through the darkness.
And I wept. There was little else to do.
On the third day, the witch-hunters were certain that I had perished in the fire of the house, for they could not find me and trusted my grandparents because-as a cover against the day he knew was coming-my grandfather had belonged to the witch-hunting group. So it was that on the third day I was brought forth from the closet and into the parlor where my grandmother kissed me and dried my eyes on her gray, coarse apron. On that same day, Grandfather came to me where I sat with my grandmother, his huge and calloused hands folded over each other, concealing something. "Ive a surprise for you, Andy."
I smiled.
He took one hand from the other, revealing a lump of coal with eyes a shade darker than the rest of it. "Caesar!" I cried. Caesar was my myna bird, rescued in some unknown, unknowable, miraculous fashion from the holocaust of the exorcism.
I ran to Grandfather, and as I ran, the bird screeched in imitation: "Andyboy, Andyboy." I stopped, my feet suddenly rocks too heavy to lift another inch, and I stared at it. It fluttered a wing. "Andyboy, Andyboy, An-"
And I started to scream. It was an involuntary scream, torn from my lungs, bursting through my lips, roaring madly into the room. The mynas words were mockings of my mothers words. The inflection, though certainly not the tone, was perfect. Memories of my mother flooded me: warm kitchens to burned corpse to storytelling sessions to a headless, bloodless body. Bad and good memories mixed, mingled, blew each other to larger than life reality in my memory. I turned and ran from the parlor. Wings beat against me. Caesar was a stuck recording.
Grandfather was running too, but he did not seem to be Grandfather any longer. Instead, he had become one of the witch-hunters shooting out the windows of our house, screaming for my mothers death.
Running through the half open cellar door, I stumbled down the steps, almost crashing down to a broken neck on the concrete, flailing at the hideous wings and the sharp orange beak that tried to be her lips. I locked myself in the coal room while Caesar battered himself to tatters against the thick door. When Grandfather finally broke it down, I was on my knees with my head against the floor, unable to scream in anything but a hoarse whisper. My knuckles were raw from pounding them into the concrete, my blood a polka-dot pattern on the smooth grayness.
I was taken to bed, nursed, recovered, and sent off-planet to an aunts house in another solar system where men were coming of age faster. I grew up, took Eternity Combines treatments in one of the first test groups, and outlived Caesar, Grandfather, witch-hunters, and all.
Years later at one of Congressman Horners parties, a psychologist told me it had all been a trauma concerning death and my new perception of it. I told him trauma was a terribly inadequate word and went off to dance with a particularly lovely young woman.
Now, even years after that, I was experiencing fear much the same as the fear that day so long ago when I was five and my mother was three days dead. It was the fear of death, stinking, oppressive, and omnipresent. I am always afraid at the beginning of a hunt. It made no difference, this day, that I had gone on two hundred and fifteen others; it was this one that was immediate and frightening. If I was killed in these jungles, Eternity Combine could never reach me in time to restore me to life. If I died here, I stayed dead. Forever is a long, long time.
Why the risk? It does seem strange that, in a galaxy so diversified, so full of things to do and ways to earn a living, anyone would chose something as
dangerous as Beast hunting. But there are always reasons. Man, a part of nature, is never totally illogical. He can generally come up with reasons for his actions. Sometimes, of course, the reasons may give rise to questions... Anyway, Crazy had a good reason for coming on this hunt: this Beast had killed his only brother, who had been on the last team that had gone after it. Crazy wanted revenge. No Hamlet, but every bit as determined. Lotus came because she cant leave us if she knows were endangering ourselves. She would go insane waiting for us, so she comes along. Me? Money, in part. There was an enormous bounty on this Beast, and I was determined it would be one-third mine. Besides, I was born on Earth and the faults of the place partially warped me. I like to kill. Not anything but Beasts, you understand. I could never bring myself to murder another human being. But Beasts... Well, Beasts are different...
I loaded the last of the cameras into the floater, looked around for the others. "Lotus! Crazy! Lets get a move on!"
"All right, all right," Crazy said, stomping down the steps to the outside entrance of the guest house. We were staying on Congressman Horners Earth ranch under the supervision of his aide, Sam Penuel, an altogether strange man, until the completion of the job. Horse, being as he weighed three hundred pounds plus fifty and was blessed with hooves, did not use the highly polished, slippery indoor steps of glittering plastiglass. Oh, his full name was Crazy Horse. No it wasnt, either. Jackson Lincoln Puicca was his given name-after the famous general, the famous president and humanitarian, and the famous scientist. But we called him Crazy Horse-mostly because he was crazy-and because he sure did look like a horse.
Crazy was a natural mutant, not a product of the Artificial Wombs. One day there had been a nuclear war spreading through the civilized galaxy. Several generations later, there was Crazy-muscular, bright, shaggy-headed, and horse-behinded. Not a Beast, mind you; a valuable man on a bounty hunt.
