not the magnitude of the feeling, but the quality which
made it so different. For the first time, I understood my
godhood in a personal sense, understood that revenge was
possible on a scale that I had never before comprehended.
I had not been able to release that pent-up vengeance on a
man, like Morsfagen, because pity had outweighed anger.
But I could never pity a machine, a thing without feelings.
I realized that my vengeance would always have to be
directed against ideas and things and constructions borne
of those ideas rather than against men; all men were piti-
able in their stupid blindness to fact, but the creations of
that stupidity, the ideas and ideals based on that stupidity
deserved nothing but loathing and condemnation.
For a moment, I had the fleeting thought that this sense
of power over the artificial wombs was much like the sense
of power which the young guard at the Tombs had experi-
enced in his fantasies about slaughtering his parents in
their bed. Like him, I was rising up against the most
fundamental loyalty of my life, against the salty seed and
the warm womb which had engendered me (albeit, with
the aid of some eighty technicians and physicians and
computer programmers). But I thrust that notion down
and got on with the job at hand.
I raised my figurative ax over my mother’s symbolic
head and savored the destruction I was about to
wreak….
Did Jesus think of striking Mary down? Hardly. But I
had given up that vision of God. I was another sort
altogether.
I split open the surfaces of the walls and peeled back
the plastic and the plaster, revealed the snaking conduits
and the tangled ganglion of wires. I grasped these nerves
gleefully and tore them free of the womb structures, sent
the complex mechanisms into shuddering, heavy spasms of
mechanical terror and confusion, into wrenching machine
agony that drew smoke rather than blood or tears.
Moving swiftly, almost maniacally, I wrenched the pro-
gramming keyboards loose of their connections and
smashed them repeatedly into the floor.
The wombs were no longer connected to a brain to tell
them what to do with themselves.
Smoke rose from the blocks of data-processing equip-
ment, and tapes whined senselessly through the memory
banks, seeking answers that could not be found.
There was but one answer, and that answer was God,
and that God was me….
I shattered the glass outer walls of all the wombs,
The floor was littered with fragments of sharp, bright,
and bloodless flesh.
I broke inward, reached the heart of each warm, dark
chamber, and shredded the slowly forming germ cells,
squashed them.
I destroyed the wombs from inside, working back
toward the shattered outer walls until there was nothing
left but powder and fumes.
It must have looked singularly strange in that place:
invisible hands making havoc in the center of that techno-
logical wonder; explosions without origin; plastic dribbling
down and lying in cooling puddles on the floor; smoke
rising everywhere…. It must have looked as if Nature
had risen up in fury to dispose of such a blasphemous and
pretentious project as this last folly of man’s.
In essence, that was exactly what had happened.
Mother was dead.
And she was disfigured.
I had never had a father.
I left that place of smoldering memories, of twisted
plastic and running wires, jellied tubes and transistors,
returned to the hospital room where my body sat in the
same chair where I had left it. Morsfagen and the others
remained in a state of suspended animation, offering no
resistance.
In a few moments, I had made all the necessary deci-
sions; I knew what had to be done next. I had decided
everything with the speed and the thoroughness of a
super-computer, my thought processes racing faster and
faster as the godly power within me became further inte-
grated with my own mind. And I knew there were no
flaws in my plans.
A god is not plagued with doubt.
I divorced my mind from my body again, and sought
out of the AC complex, across vast stretches of land
toward the minds of other men, where I would begin to