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 alclass="underline" 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 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.