In the morning, he got enough courage to get the Rover and charge the battery. He had decided to leave. Perhaps the spider would not be able to follow him. But before he could go, he would have to create himself some company to make the miles seem shorter. He picked up the identity wafer which Noname had said belonged to Bitty Belina, and he fed it carefully into the machine.
The Furnace lighted.
He took the two control knobs in his hands.
Creation was begun.
In the Vonopoen Book of Wisdom, there are two verses that are attributed to the saints, the first to Saint Zenopau, the second to the Rogue Saint, Eclesian. The first tells us: “The identity of God changes, as his children unseat him.
Each generation, we come under the hand of a fledgling deity who has gained his power through fratricide. This explains why God is clumsy and why his wisdom has never equaled that of his creations: He never had a full lifetime in which to learn.” The second verse, in the words of Eclesian, explains: “We can rejoice in our humanity, for there will come a day when God’s creatures will have grown more powerful than he. Then we will rise up and dethrone him and his children, and the magic of life-death suspension will be ours. This is not a threat to the divine powers, merely a statement of ecological progression.”
December
She sat on the folded blankets, which elevated her enough so that she could see over the dashboard. She watched the land rush toward and past them with a keen interest, and she seemed awed by the immensity of the world. It was a great deal larger than the stage, even larger than an entire theater, indescribably huge.
She was fascinated by snow. Often, she turned her gaze directly into the steel-gray sky, as if she expected to discover that it was like a saltshaker, the Sakes of snow a seasoning for the earth.
“What is it?” she asked.
“What?”
“Snow.”
“It’s snow,” he said.
“What makes it?”
He was silent, watching the curtain of white that swept over and around them as they plummeted down a long slope, still headed north, deeper into the unremitting land toward the pole.
“I didn’t ask,” he said.
“What?”
“Pertos. Never said. What snow . . . is”
“Can we stop?”
“Why?”
“So I can touch the snow. I want to see what it feels like.” She had the largest, most beautiful eyes, and he could not deny them anything.
He slowed the truck, pulled it onto a wide rest area when he had a chance. He kept the engine running, reached across her and opened her door. “Quickly.”
She scampered across the seat and dropped down into the snow. She was wearing her costume, the thigh-length skirt, her thin blouse, and her feet were bare.
“It’s cold!” she squealed, shivering, hugging herself and laughing. “And it’s wet l”
She made a ball of it in her small hands and threw it in the cab at him. It struck his shirt sleeve and fell on the seat. He picked it up and threw it back at her.
“Come on,” he said. He didn’t like to have her out of reach. He was afraid she would try to escape, even though he knew she could not go very far from the Furnace. It was just that everyone seemed to be going away, leaving him by himself. And he could not stand that. It made him feel left out, rejected. Sometimes he was certain that only he and Bitty Belina inhabited this world, the last two living creatures. And if she escaped, he would be here forever, alone. And being the only man in the world carried too many responsibilities, too many duties that were beyond him.
She climbed into the truck again. He reached over and pulled her door shut.
“Wet and cold,” she repeated.
He pulled onto the highway, and they continued north.
They drove from immediately after breakfast until quite late at night when his eyes refused to stay open any longer. They kept food in the cab so they could eat while they rode, and the only brief stops were for the toilet. In all this time, they did not see another car nor any aircraft of any sort. The only other moving things in the world were the truck and the snow. For Sebastian, the road and the humming rotars of the air-cushion system became a way of life, and the routine settled his nerves somewhat.