Every time he turned on the light, the idiot repeated to himself the importance of charging the battery. If he ever left this place, he would have to learn that an electric vehicle must be filled with electricity at regular intervals, even when its batteries are, as Samuels said, the best man had ever devised.
There, at night, with the single overhead light, he would go to work with the Furnace. Weeks earlier, parked in another forest a couple of hundred miles away from here, he had puzzled out the way the wafer was put into the machine, and he had started creating. But because the use of the two knobs confused him, the results had been distressing. The puppets had been deformed, monsters with melted faces and without eyes, with legs that seemed to have no bones, with arms that did not end in hands, but lumps of protoplasm instead. The only halfway decent result was Noname, but even he was disfigured. And despite the fact he had been formed with an identity wafer, he did not know who he was or remember any of his past periods of consciousness as should have been imprinted on the wafer. Sebastian had worked diligently after Noname, but the puppet had not signaled that the idiot was on the correct course. He had been an accident, and the puppets made after him seemed more grotesque and horrid than those which had come before. The idiot closed down the Furnace, angry and confused. He kept Noname out of the flesh bank to provide company, and together they drove north, without purpose.
Then the dead battery.
Then Ben Samuels.
And now, for three weeks, the woods and the long nights, the listening to stories and watching the old man draw. But Sebastian was restless.
He hungered for company, for the special companionship he had known with Pertos in the old days. Noname, of
course, was company of sorts, though not the kind he sought. Noname was too much like himself to really compliment his personality: floundering, lost, seeking signposts of one sort or another. Samuels did not provide what he required, for the old man was careful not to meddle, careful not to make his suggestions into commands. He could not know that, in fact, part of what the idiot required eras commanding. The world seemed increasingly unreliable and fluid, and he longed for someone like Pertos to tell him what to do with his time.
For some reason, Bitty Belina was on his mind constantly. She represented a touch with the old script, the life he had stopped leading. If he could only resurrect her, all would be well. He was sure of that. He had forgotten the way in which she had spoken to him, the way -she had laughed with the others, the way she had pleaded with him to kill Pertos.
She was a pretty puppet.
He remembered that he liked her laugh.
And her smile.
And her yellow hair.
If Bitty Belina could be returned to him, whole and safe, then all would be well. And perhaps, if she was here with him, he would stop having nightmares about a blond girl named jenny with a knife in her belly . . . If there was a panacea for all bad memories, it was Belina.
Near the end of October, he put the pieces of the Furnace together once again, in the rear of the truck. He had forgotten how to tap the vehicle’s battery, but he required only a little while to relearn the technique. He rolled back the Olmescian amoeba until it clung to the rear of the machine, quivering gently, out of his way. Cautiously, he set about the clumsy work of learning godhood.
Noname watched.
This time, the deformed puppet took more of an interest in creation than he had before. In the intervening weeks, he had had an opportunity to come to know Sebastian, and he no longer feared his master as he had at first. He stood on the casing of the Furnace, near the faceplate that gave view of the capsule-womb, waiting for a miracle.
Sebastian shuffled the identity wafers, pausing to study the printing on the smooth side of each, as if some single word would pop up and stand above the incomprehensible pattern of the others: Belina. But when he had gone through all of them, he still had no idea which was hers. Two hundred and fifty puppets waited, and the chances were he would resurrect the evil stepmother, Wissa, before he called Belina to life. And he didn’t want to do that, although he knew he could feed her into the Furnace again and be rid of her if she did show up before the heroine.