ally and mentally stable for the first time. The old fears
and worries would no longer plague them, and their per-
sonalities (which had been structured all their lives to
nurture the needs which were produced by those fears and
worries) would be drastically reshaped. But for the better,
surely—for the better. I was God, and I could not make
mistakes.
Otherwise, why would you worship me?
I departed from the minds in the room, though I did
not summon anyone back to consciousness. I did not need
their help to command the tides and to grow storms in the
heavens—nor for the much broader changes I wished to
bring about in the world.
I settled down to bringing a new face to the Earth,
enjoying every moment of my godhood—perhaps too
well….
III
And there, in that hospital room in the upper floors of
the Artificial Creation complex, with the dead and bleed-
ing mutant form before me, I knew the greatest triumphs
of my entire life. I ranged far from those white walls,
though I never once rose from the chair in which I sat. I
flew over seas and continents without benefit of a body—
without even an analogue form—to contain my psychic
energies. Miracles were within my grasp now, and though
I did not change any water into wine or raise any men
from the dead, I did other things, yes, other things….
The first order of business, so far as I was concerned,
was to reach downward through the floors of the great
structure and locate that place where I had been born,
where plastic womb had contained me and where wired
uterus had spit me out. It was no sentimental journey, no
longing for a return to those cold mother walls, but the
bitter-sweet taste of a deeply abiding vengeance.
I sent my awareness drifting down through the layers of
the huge building, through plaster and lath, plastic and
steel, through electrical conduits and wads of fluffy in-
sulating material. I passed the radiating awareness of
other human beings, but did not stop to handle them just
yet, bent on the confrontation I had dreamed of for years.
Oedipal?
Not exactly. I did not want to kill my father and marry
my mother, merely to kill my mother and be free. Cer-
tainly, there was a quality of love in it too, but that was
easily overlooked.
I found the lowest two floors, where the paraphernalia
of the genetic engineers cored the walls like fungus, fila-
ments threaded through the plaster like disease worms.
Machines descended from the ceilings of the rooms, thrust
upward from the floors. There were blocks of data process-
ing computers, memory banks and calculating components
which handled everything from temperature regulation
to DNA-RNA balance in the chemical sperm and egg.
Along the walls and on various raised platforms around the
floor there were programming keyboards for the men and
women who maintained the delicacy of the computers’
decisions.
In every great chamber, the center of attention was the
womb itself. It was contained in a large, square glass tank
whose exterior walls were more than three inches thick.
Between these outer petitions and the meat of the nut,
there were thinner layers of grass along with fiberglass
wads of insulation. In the center were the nonconductive
plastic walls, cored with the miles of wires reporting
conditions back to the computers. There were electrode
nubbins there by the tens of thousands, and waldoes so
minuscule as to be unbelievable were doing impossibly
tiny things to impossibly tiny creations, spheres of cells
not yet remotely shaped like human beings.
Mother…
The womb, darkness, quietude, thrumming pulse of
hidden works felt more than heard …
There were more than eighty technicians and medical
attendants clustered in the rooms of the genetic engineer-
ing equipment, all of them busy. I reached out with my
godly esp and took control of every one of their minds.
Work ceased; conversation broke off in midsentence. I
directed them out of that place, upward through the
building to regions of safety.
I surveyed the place as a sense of power stirred in me
the like of which I had never experienced before. It was