THE MAGIC LABYRINTH by Philip Jose Farmer

“What if I should see her again, this woman who said that she could never love another man on Earth or in Heaven? Not that this world is Heaven. What would I do, say, ‘Hello, Isabel. It’s been a long time’?

“No, I’d run like the veriest coward. Hide. Yet…

“And here’s the entrance to the engine room. Is Podebrad on duty tonight? What if he is? I cannot confront him until we get to the headwaters.

“There goes a figure, dim in the mists. Is it an agent of the Ethicals? Or X, the renegade, skulking in the fog? He is always here now, there then, as elusive as the concept of time and eternity, nothingness and somethingness.

“Who goes there?” I should shout. But he—she—it is gone.

“While I was in that transition between sleeping and waking, between death and resurrection, I saw God. ‘You owe for the flesh,’ He said, that bearded old gentleman in the garments of 1890, and in another dream He said, ‘Pay up.’

“Pay what? What is the price?

“I didn’t ask for the flesh, I didn’t petition to be born. Flesh, life, should be gratis.

“I should have detained Him. I should have asked him if a man does have free will or are all his actions, his nonactions, too, determined. Written down in the world’s Bradshaw, so-and-so will arrive at such-a-place at 10:32 A.M. and will depart at 10:40 on track 12. If I am a train on His railway, then I am not responsible for anything I do: Evil and good are not my doing. In fact, there is no evil and good. Without free will, they don’t exist.

“But He won’t be detained. And if He were, would I understand his explanation of death and immortality, of determinism and indeterminism, of determinacy and indeterminacy?

“The human mind cannot grasp these. But if it can’t, it’s God’s fault—if there is a God.

“When I was surveying the Sind area in India, I became a Sufi, a Master Sufi. But watching them in the Sind and in Egypt and seeing them end by proclaiming themselves to be God, I concluded that extreme mysticism was closely allied to madness.

“Nur ed-Din el-Musafir, who is a Sufi, says that I do not understand. One, there are fake or deluded Sufis, degenerates of that great discipline. Two, when a Sufi says that he is God, he does not mean that literally. He is saying that he has become one with God, though not God.

“Great God! I will penetrate to His heart, to the heart of the Mystery and the mysteries. I am a living sword, but I have been attacking with my edge, not with my point. The point is the most deadly, not the edge. I will be from now on the point.

“Yet, if I’m to find my way through the magic labyrinth, I mush have a thread to follow to the great beast that lives in its heart. Where is that thread? No Ariadne. I will be myself the thread and Ariadne and Theseus. Just as.. .why didn’t I think of this before?—I am the labyrinth.

“Not quite true. What is? It’s always not quite. But in human, and divine, affairs, a near-hit is sometimes as good as a direct hit. The larger the exploding shell, the less it matters that it doesn’t strike the bull’s eye.

“Yet a sword is no good unless it’s well balanced. It has been said of me, I have the wide-reading Frigate for authority, that some have said that I was one in whom Nature ran riot, that I had not one but thirty splendid talents. But I had no sense of balance or of direction either. That I was an orchestra without a director, a fine ship with only one flaw: no compass. As I’ve said of myself, a blaze of light without focus.

“If I couldn’t do something first, I wouldn’t do it.

“That it’s the abnormal, the perverse and the savage, in men, not the divine in their nature, that fascinate me.

“That, though I was deeply learned, I never understood that wisdom had little to do with knowledge and literature and nothing to do with learning.