He had done it this once, but as he saw his hands still trembling, still murmuring to themselves in spasms, he knew it was the one time he would ever do it. There was no memory of how, or why, or even of when…but it was his work, of that he was certain. The pain in his wrists told him it was.
The moment of truth stood high above him, resplendent in marble, but there would be no other moments.
This was Colin Marshack’s life, in its totality, now. The sound of sobbing was only broken periodically, as he began to drink.
Waiting. The Ethos waited. Trente had known they would. It was inevitable. Foolish for him to conceive of a situation of which they would not have an awareness.
Away. From your post, away.
“I had to know. It has been growing in me, a live thing in me. I had to know. It was the only way. I went to a planet, and lived within what they call ‘men’ and knew. I think I understand now.”
Know. What is it you know?
“I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain there can be no pleasure. Without sadness there can be no happiness. Without misery, there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned. “
Adult. You have become adult.
“I know…this is what became of the other Paingods before me. They grew into concern, into knowing, and then…”
Lost. They were lost to us.
“They could not take the step; they could not go to one of the ones to whom they had sent pain, and learn. So they were no use as Paingod. I understand. Now I know, and I am returned.”
Do. What will you do?
“I will send more pain than ever before. More and greater.”
More? You will send more?
“Much more. Because now I understand. It is a gray and a lonely place in which we live, all of us, swinging between desperation and emptiness, and all that makes it worthwhile is caring, is beauty. But if there were no opposite for beauty, or for pleasure, it would all turn to dust. “
Being. Now you know who you are.
“I am most blessed of the Ethos, and most humble. You have given me the highest, kindest position in the universes. For I am the God to all men, and to all creatures small and large, whether they call me by name or not. I am Paingod, and it is my life, however long it stretches, to treat them to the finest they will ever know. To give them pain, that they may know pleasure. Thank you. “
And the Ethos went away, secure that at last, after all the eons of Paingods who had broken under the strain, who had lacked the courage to take that nightwalk, they had found one who would last truly forever. Trente had come of age.
While back in the cubicle, hanging star-bright and translucent in space, high above it all, yet very much part of it all, the creature who would never die, the creature who had lived within the rotting body of Pieter Koslek and for a few moments in the soul and talent of Colin Marshack, that creature called Paingod, learned one more thing, as he stared at the tiny model of the planet Earth he had known.
Trente knew the feel of a tear formed in a duct and turned free from an eye globe—cool on his face.
Trente knew happiness.
About forty-five per cent of this is a true story. Eat your heart out figuring which is real and which is phony. Or simply repeat to yourself, “For I am a jealous people,” and remember not to screw around with the supplicants, baby.
Ernest and the Machine God
Gods in their Heaven, all’s right with the world.
Selena: fighting desperately to keep her eyes open.
The road: North Carolina, like a snake, rock mountain wall to the left, sheer drop into nowhere on the right.
The night: black, dead and staring, like the eyes of a man lying on a kitchenette floor in a motel in Washington, D.C. Somewhere back there behind Selena.
The fear: that they could trace her, through his department, or through the woman who had rented them the motel room. And catch her. And put her in prison. And then kill her, for killing him.
The car: a 1951 Packard, sea-green, huge as a Tyrannosaurus, bought late the day before, for thirty-two dollars, all she had had in her purse {all she had been able to take off his body) from a street-corner used-car lot in the filthy Negro section of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
The destination: Florida. Getaway. Hideaway.
Her eyes slid quickly guillotine closed. The uneven ratcheting of gravel under the front tires brought her sharply awake again. She pulled the car back onto the road. Over the edge, out through the right-side windows, she knew there was a sheer drop into the valley below. It was too deep and too black even to estimate the fall. Enough to kill a car, and its driver.
The road twisted back and around, heading up and up, always up and up. Fog slithered toothlessly across the road at every minor dip, and the center line had been dimmed to headlights many years before by wheels and weather. The lanes were one each way, and too narrow for a compact, much less the behemoth she spun through the turns. It smelled of vomit in the back seat. Thirty-two dollars. A dead man lying face-up on a linoleum floor, a corkscrew still in his hand.
There was no guard railing or built-up shoulder over there on her right. It ended with frost-chipped road edge, thin rut of dirt, and the drop into the abyss. Her eyes closed slowly, flickering, drooping lids over dull film of sleep…
…and woke suddenly as the right front tire left the road, skimmed across the dirt, and rode in empty air…
…her eyes snapped open, and instinctively she wrenched the wheel back hard left. The right front tire spun against the edge, still clawing emptiness, but the Packard lurched left and forward as she hit the accelerator, and the tire chewed its way through loose topsoil and regained the road, the car now plunging hard left, suddenly rushing up the short incline at the base of the rock wall, tilting, and running along the side of the wall almost horizontally.
The car struck an outcropping with a monstrous clang, and Selena was thrown against the steering wheel, crushing her breasts against the ungiving circle. Sudden gray washed over her and she fell back, feet flopping off the pedals, arms limp at her sides. The car rebounded, suddenly stalled, and in the North Carolina night there was only silence…
…and the sound of a storm, far off in the mountains…
Nowhere is North Carolina. Nowhere is the land of fear. Nowhere is flight without destination, only a looming back there, where all flights begin.
Selena, in fog gray, lived it again….
Three years at Duke University had taught Selena all she needed to know: that college was a dead end for her. The degree of cunning that she brought to her academic life was more than she needed to get a steady 3.2 average. It was tantamount to hunting a flea with an elephant gun. She had been fascinated briefly by some of the experimental studies done by Rhine and others in the parapsychology labs, but even that had palled quickly; they were fools, tinkering with improbabilities. Selena doted on reality.
Reality for Selena took essential form in one word: manipulation.
Hidden deep in the entrails of that word was its power-source, the word: power.