“Should I watch them?” Sebastian asked.
“Yes,” Pertos said. “I’ll be in my room for an hour. Then we must be prepared for the show.”
Sebastian moved his stool closer to the puppets.
Pertos gazed one last time around the room, then departed that place, the Holistian Pearl already in his hands. He walked the dark corridor to his room, went inside, closed the door and sank upon the couch there, utterly exhausted spiritually as well as physically. It was not that he minded playing God in the creation of the puppets. He thought of himself as nothing more than an operator of the Vonopoen devices. It was when the play was done and the small living creatures must be returned to lifeless, waiting liquid that made him miserable. To be a life-giving god leads only to pleasure. To deal death to those fragile creatures while they watched, aware of what was to be done to them, sapped a man’s soul. The depression always set in upon creation, because creation could only lead to death again, later. He rolled the Pearl over and over in his fingers, seeking solace.
The gray surface of the living jewel slowly responded to his caress, absorbing the body heat he offered, sucking up the energy of friction caused by the stone rolling across the microscopically ridged flesh. Its pale color seeped from it as whiteness flowed in. In moments, it was storing the energy to carry on its life functions, and a moment later he had given it more than it could hold. It used the incoming excess of energy to play its own role in this symbiosis. Through the nerves in the tips of his fingers, it flushed a distortion throughout his body, sent him into synathesia where all senses were confused, where sight came as smell and sound as pictures. The Pearl fired alien images in his brain, plunged him through the heart of a star and into even stranger places where it had been in its eternity of existence.
The Pearl had had a thousand masters in its life to date, and now it drew on all their experiences, all the scenes and events it had shared while in their possession. It touched filaments of power along the surface of Pertos’ brain, stepped up the vividness of the dreams and took him across the universe in the bodies of half a dozen races, in half a hundred strange spaceships, through half a thousand points of wonder.
And he accepted.
For a while, he forgot that he was a god of sorts and tha doom would follow genesis. There was a large audience for the first night’s two performances. Every seat in the auditorium was filled, three thousand paying customers in all. Those seated too far to either side or toward the last half of the hall had raised the folding telescopic windowplates on the backs of the seats before them and were watching the magnified stage and the drawn, emerald curtain with childlike anticipation.
The robotic orchestra played something of RimskiKorsakov’s, cymbals crashing and drums growing ominous, then flutes and piccolos bursting forth with sign that fairness and good still existed in the black scene the music painted.
Sebastian peeked through the curtains again and again, watching the patrons, carrying an excitement that came only with a performance. If the combination of dress styles from a hundred worlds looked strange out there, Sebastian didn’t notice. It was not the clothes, but the people that excited him. So many people, so close, all there for the puppets he helped bring them.
He closed the gap in the curtain and turned to look over the puppets who stood together, talking, perhaps working over their lines. He had always wondered what the puppets talked about when they were together, alone, but he could ‘, never fathom what it might be. Pertos said they sometimes I, dreamed of escape, though they could never go farther from the Furnace than a thousand yards without suffering an excruciating, unendurable pain that eventually forced them back where they belonged.
Bitty Belina was looking very earnest, her little brow wrinkled, her eyes set and sparkling, her lips moving steadily, almost as if in ritual cadence, repeating some charm or magic spell.