ty of what must be done.
Larry took two more paces, stepped in front of me,
drew the rifle over his head—all of this happening so
slowly, so measuredly that it seemed like a ballet—and
brought the square butt down on my left shoulder so hard
that I felt tissue separating.
I did not see the pretty stars at all this time, only a
velvety and total darkness….
When I woke up, it was to the acrid odor of smelling
salts which I rebelled against, gagging and pushing back
from the stuff. But aside from that quite natural rejection,
I offered no opposition. For the moment, Morsfagen was
convinced he knew me. He suspected nothing and thought
my anger was genuine.
I followed docilely to the corridor, the elevator, and the
filming studios, where I played dead for them. Quite
convincingly, he told me. They even let me bleed a little
for them….
By late afternoon, the films had been made. There was
a team waiting to rush the product to the city’s main
broadcasting facilities, where it would be shown for the
edification and entertainment of the consensus citizenry
sitting safe at home this night.
From there, we went to Child’s room, where nothing
had changed: lights dim, bedclothes rumpled, the mutant
husk still lying there in the smell of sickness, antiseptics,
and starch.
“Are you ready?” Morsfagen asked.
I’m not only ready, but anxious! I thought. But I did
not say anything. It seemed the time to be petulant,
snippy, moody. And he seemed to relish my performance.
The lights were dimmed, the recorders started, Child
raised a little in his bed, and I was at last within reach of
the godhood I had been seeking all my life….
FOUR
Man As God…
I
I touched the sheen of His mental surface, drew back
from the cold, humming tune of ultimate power.
In the darkness of the empty conscious mind, I hovered
over the bending amber shell, slid along its eternal curve
toward the horizon which always danced just beyond my
grasp. In time, I found the weak spot on that amber
smoothness, saw the moving shadows of things beneath, of
things in the id and ego below. I pried at that weak spot,
slit it open, sailed through and into God’s mind….
Imagine:
Imagine the largest mirror in the universe, a million
light-years from edge to beveled edge (no matter who the
artisans were who created such a marvel, it is only the
mirror itself which engages us). On such a great glass,
there would be literally countless millions of visions, bits
and pieces of colorful landscapes and peoples, events and
futures and pasts and even moments of sundry present-
tunes. Further imagine a cosmic hammer as large as a star
(again, we care not of the men who forged that instru-
ment, but only of its actions) brought to bear on the very
center of that fantastic mirror. And then imagine the
flying shards of silvered glass clattering down, down, down
into the bottom of Existence, to the end of Time, and
there to lie in pools of pitch blackness with their wild re-
flections frozen in them.
This was the mental landscape inside of Child this time,
far different from what it had been. It was a mind of
superhuman dimensions, fractured into near uselessness,
the mind of God, the Being who had made the Earth, the
galaxy, the universe, and each of us in it, the god who had
forged the first DNA and RNA and begun the craziest
dream ever. And yet it was the most disorganized place I
had ever seen—disorganized and brilliant at the same
moment, wilder, stranger, more fearful than any mind I
had seen in all my years of head-tripping.
I settled through glazes of amber …
… through ice spicule clouds the color of freshly spilled
blood…
. . . through a fine blue fog and finally down into the
smashed visions of this mad universe…
For a while I hung there, feet of my analogue body
inches above a glittering shard of stars. Then I touched
bare toes on galaxies and walked across the ruined skies to
another fragment, this a jungle scene with strange birds