is there because it has become so familiar to him. Such it
is with disaster and war. You can forget as long as it does
not touch you, and you can live in better times. It takes a
certain peripheral vision deficiency, but that can be mas-
tered with but a small expenditure of time and energy.
I had oranges and tea for breakfast, which helped my
headache.
Outside, the city crews had finished cleaning up the
snow. The streets were bare, but the buildings and trees
were smothered with whiteness. Fences became delicate
laceworks. Trees and shrubs were conglomerations of ici-
cles welded together by a frost-fingered artist. A bitter
wind swept over everything, stirring the snow, whipping it
against the neat houses, the sides of hovercars, and up my
nose.
It was as if Nature, via the snowstorm, had tried to
reclaim what had once been hers but was now lost to her
forever.
Clouds, heavy and gray, betrayed the advent of yet
another storm. A low flock of birds streaked north, some
kind of geese or other. Their calls were long and cold.
I passed by the broken store window where the howler
had lain on its side the night before. It had been removed.
There were no police around.
I passed by a church which had burned sometime after
I had returned from the AC complex. Its black skeleton
seemed leeringly evil.
At AC, the hex signs were on the walls, the lights were
dimmed, the machines stood sentinel, and Child was
tranced.
“You’re late,” Morsfagen said. His fists were drawn
tightly together. I wondered if he had opened his hands
at all since he had stalked out of the room last night.
“You don’t have to pay me for the first five minutes,” I
said. I smiled the famous smile.
It didn’t cheer him up much.
I slid into the chair opposite Child and looked him
over. I don’t know what I expected to have changed.
Perhaps it seemed too much to believe that he could go to
bed at night and get up in the morning, still in that same
condition. It was as if some healing process had to be
underway. But, if anything, he looked more wrinkled and
decaying than before.
Harry was there. He had worked a third of the Times
crossword, in ink as he always does, so he must have been
there for some while. Like an old woman coming early to
mass. “You sure?” he asked me.
“Quite,” I said. And I was immediately sorry for having
cut him so short. It was the atmosphere of the place,
so damned military. And it was Morsfagen. Like Herod—
trying to destroy the Child. I was the assassin sent out. And
whether my knife was an intellectual or a physical one
made no difference, really.
I was on edge for another reason; there was a certain
dinner guest this evening….
This time I parachuted through the emptiness of his
consciousness, no flailing, ready for the drop that awaited
me….
… Labyrinth …
The walls were hung with cobwebs, and the floor was
strewn with dirt and bones. The walls were multi-fluted,
polished here, rugged here, but a uniform gray every-
where. Far down there, somewhere in the nova-like center
of the mind was the Id. It gave out the same, nearly
unbearable whine that all Ids do. And somewhere above, in
the blackness and the perfect quietude, was the area
where the conscious mind should have been. It was clear
that the mind of a super-genius was strangely unhuman.
Most minds think in disconnected pictures, flittering arrays
of scenes and snatches of the past, but Child’s mind created
an entire world of its own, a realism within his mind, an
analogue that I could explore like the actual terrain of
some lost land.
There was a clacking of hooves, and from the source of
light at the end of the tunnel came the outline in smoke,
then the form in flesh of a Minotaur, nut-brown skin and
all textures of black hair, eyes gleaming, steam caught in
the large ovals of the nostrils.
“Get out!”
I mean no harm.
“Get out, Simeon.”