"You killed us. And we are you."
No!
Other faces superimpose above the maelstrom, so close he can feel their breath: Moonchild in her black half-mask; JJ Flash; Cosmic Traveler's blue face, itself infinitely mutable, shadowed within the cowl of his cloak of stars; Aquarius' gray face, stolid, smooth, and disapproving.
"You have trapped us," Traveler says. "We are your victims too."
"You must release us to pursue our own karma," says Moonchild "You must not hold onto us for your own selfish purposes."
JJ Flash says, "I wanna lie my own life. Not be a sometime stooge for a burnt-out old hippie." Aquarius says nothing at all.
In the background, a clamor; familiar voices, vying for attention. He recognizes the chorus from the back of his skull. Aren't they already talking to him? He concentrates, looks past the faces of his friends, which scatter to the corners of the Universe with mocking laughter. Beyond them he sees ... their true faces?
A glimpse, no more; and then a giant fanged mouth, yellow-orange with the flames of Hell and rushing toward him with locomotive speed. He smells the stink of brimstone and corruption and turns to flee -
- He is caught up, swallowed, swept up and up and up, till he towers two hundred feet above the ground, and on his head are upswept horns, and thrusting from his loins is a hard-on the size of a Greyhound bus, and burning in his belly is the lust to slay and maim and rape the world while it lies at his feet.
And at his feet lies Sprout, naked and cowering. He bends toward her, erection quivering, stretches out a hand with human meat decaying beneath black claws -
"No!"
- Mark sat bolt upright, wet as though he'd just emerged from a swimming pool, throat hoarse from the scream that woke him. Sprout, wearing a long T-shirt, clung to his neck crying, "Daddy, Daddy!" He tried to soothe her, but she could only sob.
Then he smelled incense and heard cool music, and looked up. Ganesha stood above his bed, great ears outspread in darkness. He held forth a lotus bloom.
"Dreamless sleep," the guru said, "is the gift of the gods. It may be attained as an elevated form of samadhi, through meditation."
Slowly Mark unwound his clawed hands from the sheets. He slid an arm around his daughter. He held the palm of his other hand up to accept the flower.
"Can you teach me, man?" he asked.
The great head nodded. "I can."
"Hold it! Don't move!" A shout from the doorway, Western and angular and strident after the lilt of Ganesha's voice. Belew stood there in nightshirt and skivvies, holding his handgun leveled two-handed at the center of Ganesna's back.
"It's - I'm okay, J. Bob," Mark said. "It was the dream again."
"I gathered. What's he doing here?"
"Just trying to help out, man," Mark said, annoyed at his friend's obtuseness.
"Indeed. How'd he get in here? Your door's gone, Mark!"
"I am the Remover of Obstacles," Ganesha said placidly. He smiled at Sprout, who brushed back tear-sodden bangs to smile tentatively back at him.
"That's not much of an answer, my friend," J. Bob said, not taking the gun off him.
"Come on, man," Mark said.
The air around J. Bob was suddenly filled with fluttering brightness. He jumped back as they swarmed around him, lashed out with his pistol. The cold steel mass struck one. It fell to the wooden floor at his feet and lay, feebly opening and closing brightly colored, self-luminous wings.
"You need not react so violently, my friend," Ganesha said, "inasmuch as they are only butterflies."
A violet and yellow one landed on Sprout's nose. She giggled.
J. Bob stood for a moment, looking at Mark through the shifting, glowing cloud. Then he let the hammer down on his pistol, turned, and stalked off to bed.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
A week later J. Robert Belew came back. Fatigue and the aching in his joints reminded him that he was not as young as he used to be. Nonetheless, he carried a glow of satisfaction in the pit of his stomach. He had reassured the Montagnards, chastised the colonel, and ambushed and destroyed a squad of North Vietnamese infiltrators. He had gotten out in the field again, and he still had his licks.
Then he came to the former ballroom which served Mark as his audience chamber, and stopped as if a Lexan barrier sealed the doorway.
J. Bob had never cared for the hippie hangings Mark affected to take the totalitarian edge off Moonchild's dealings with the public. They were nothing to what assailed his aesthetic sense now.
The room was the picture of Hindu Heaven, straight out of a hopelessly garish mid-Seventies Hare Krishna broadsheet. It was all gaud and gold and ivory, well-bangled celestial maidens playing upon the flute, the kartal cymbals and mridanga drums; bright-pinioned birds and flowers everywhere of hues so bright it hurt to look at them. In the midst of it all sat Ganesha, fat and smug, with one of those beaded Indian elephant head-harnesses strung over his Indian elephant head. Next to him, eyes shut, Moonchild floated in full lotus, eighteen inches in the air.
"There are, my daughter, many varieties of maya," the guru was explaining. "In the fatter days, after wise Shankara sought to reconcile Hinduism with Buddhism, maya came to be understood by many as meaning illusion, pure and simple. Yet there is an older meaning, woven through the Vedas, by which maya is the creative energy of nature and gods. And Nature, while it is real through the will and eternal presence of Brahma, is yet real enough.
"This is my poor power: a humble measure of the creative maya."
"So this world is not mere illusion, guru?" murmured Moonchild.
"It is, and it is not. Hold out your hand."
She did so. A yellow rose materialized in her palm. Her fingers closed around its stem.
Her eyes opened in surprise. A drop of red welled from the ball of her thumb where a thorn had pricked it. She sucked the blood away.
"The world is as real as that rose," the guru said. "If it pricks you, you bleed."
The rose vanished. Moonchild took her thumb from her mouth. A tiny drop of fresh blood ballooned from the puncture.
Belew stood leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded over his chest. "So what?" he said "So you can make her levitate. JJ Flash can fly."
Moonchild looked up with a start, then instantly dropped her eyes, as if in guilt. Ganesha laughed and laughed. Belew unfolded his arms and entered the room.
A slim figure in a saffron robe barred his way. The features were almost Takisian in fineness, the hair shaved to a russet scalplock. Belew couldn't tell whether the figure was male or female.
"What do you want here, machine?" the figure asked in a lisping hermaphrodite German accent.
"I'm this woman's head bodyguard," Belew said, looking the yellowrobe over without evident favor. "Now I'm intent on moseying over to guard her body closer up ... whether or not I have to walk over yours."
Ganesha giggled and waved. The yellowrobe drew back gracefully, with a graceful sneer of contempt. Belew mastered the impulse to tread on its toes as he walked into the room.
"Sandalwood?" he said, sniffing. "Isis, I thought Old Hippie taste was bad. But this - ?"
"Isn't it wonderful?"
Belew sighed. "What's with the she-males?" he asked, gesturing at the wispy forms in saffron robes, draped artistically about the chamber. "Are they real too, guru?"