“Kali?”
“Yes?”
“If it will give you any satisfaction in the end, I still care for you. Either there is no such thing as love, or the word does not mean what I have thought it to mean on many different occasions. It is a feeling without a name, really—better to leave it at that. So take it and go away and have your fun with it. You know that we would both be at one another’s throats again one day, as soon as we had run out of common enemies. We had many fine reconciliations, but were they ever worth the pain that preceded them? Know that you have won and that you are the goddess I worship — for are not worship and religious awe a combination of love and hate, desire and fear?”
They drank their soma in the room called Heartbreak, and the spell of Kubera lay about them.
Kali spoke:
“Shall I fall upon you and kiss you now, saying that I lied when I said I lied—so that you may laugh and say you lied, to achieve a final revenge? Go to, Lord Siddhartha! Better one of us died in Hellwell, for great is the pride of the First. We should not have come here—to this place.”
“No.”
“Shall we then depart?”
“No.”
“In this, I agree. Let us sit here and worship one another for a time.”
Her hand fell upon his own, caressed it. “Sam?”
“Yes?”
“Would you like to make love to me?”
“And so seal my doom? Of course.”
“Then let us go into the room called Despair, where the winds stand stilled and where there is a couch . . .”
He followed her from Heartbreak to Despair, his pulse quickening in his throat, and when he had laid her bare on the couch and placed his hand upon the soft whiteness of her belly, he knew that Kubera was indeed the mightiest of the Lokapalas—for the feeling to which that room had been dedicated filled him, even as his desires mounted within him and he upon her—there came a loosening, a tightening, a sigh, and the ultimate tears burning to be shed.
“What is it you wish, Mistress Maya?”
“Tell me of Accelerationism, Tak of the Archives.”
Tak stretched his great lean frame and his chair adjusted backward with a creak.
Behind him, the data banks were still, and certain rare records filled the long, high bookshelves with their colorful bindings and the air with their musty smells.
He handled the lady before him with his eyes, smiled and shook his head. She wore green, tightly, and an impatient look; her hair was an insolent red, and faint freckles flecked her nose and the hemispheres of her cheeks. Her hips and shoulders were wide, and her narrow waist tightly disciplined against this tendency.
“Why do you shake your head? Everyone comes to you for information.”
“You are young, mistress. Three avatars, if I am not mistaken. lie behind you. At this point in your career, I am certain that you do not really wish to have your name placed upon the special list of those younger ones who seek this knowledge.”
“List?”
“List.”
“Why should there be a list of such inquirers?”
Tak shrugged. “Gods collect the strangest things, and certain among them save lists.”
“I have always heard Accelerationism mentioned as a completely dead issue.”
“So why this sudden interest in the dead?”
She laughed, and her green eyes bored into his gray ones.
The Archives exploded around him, and he stood in the ballroom halfway up Milehigh Spire. It was night, so late that it would soon be morning. A party had obviously been going on for a long while; but now the crowd in which he stood had come together in the corner of the room. They were leaning, and they were sitting and reclining, and all of them listening to the short, dark, husky man who stood beside the goddess Kali and talked. This was Great-Souled Sam the Buddha, who, with his warden, had just arrived. He was talking of Buddhism and Accelerationism, and of the days of the binding, and Hellwell, and the blasphemies of Lord Siddhartha in the city of Mahartha by the sea. He was talking, and his voice went on and on, hypnotic, and he radiated power and confidence and warmth, hypnotic, and his words went on and on and on, as the crowd slowly passed out and fell down around him. All of the women were quite ugly, except for Maya, who tittered then and clapped her hands, bringing back the Archives about them, and Tak again to his chair, his smile still upon his lips.