was the he-dragon; Jack was the she-dragon; Jack was the
sperm; Jack was the egg. Far out in the ether a million universes away, three specks of dust floated near one another in interstellar space. Jack was the dust, and Jack was the space between. Galaxies unreeled around his head like long spools of paper, and fate punched each in random patterns, turning them into macrocosmic player-piano tapes which would play
everything from ragtime to funeral dirges. Jack’s happy teeth bit an orange: Jack’s unhappy flesh screamed as the teeth tore him open. He was a trillion dust-kitties under a billion beds.
He was a joey dreaming of its previous life in its mother’s pouch as the mother bounced over a purple plain where rabbits the size of deer ran and gambolled. He was ham on a
hock in Peru and eggs in a nest under one of the hens in the Ohio henhouse Buddy Parkins was cleaning. He was the powdered henshit in Buddy Parkins’s nose; he was the trembling hairs that would soon cause Buddy Parkins to sneeze; he was the sneeze; he was the germs in the sneeze; he was the atoms in the germs; he was the tachyons in the atoms travelling
backward through time toward the big bang at the start of cre-ation.
His heart skipped and a thousand suns flashed up in novas.
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He saw a googolplex of sparrows in a googolplex of
worlds and marked the fall or the well-being of each.
He died in the Gehenna of Territories ore-pit mines.
He lived as a flu-virus in Etheridge’s tie.
He ran in a wind over far places.
He was . . .
Oh he was . . .
He was God. God, or something so close as to make no
difference.
No! Jack screamed in terror. No, I don’t want to be God!
Please! Please, I don’t want to be God, I ONLY WANT TO
SAVE MY MOTHER’S LIFE!
And suddenly infinitude closed up like a losing hand fold-
ing in a cardsharp’s grasp. It narrowed down to a beam of
blinding white light, and this he followed back to the Territories Ballroom, where only seconds had passed. He still held the Talisman in his hands.
2
Outside, the ground had begun to do a carny kooch dancer’s
bump and grind. The tide, which had been coming in, re-
thought itself and began to run backward, exposing sand as
deeply tanned as a starlet’s thighs. Flopping on this uncovered sand were strange fish, some which seemed to be no more
than gelatinous clots of eyes.
The cliffs behind the town were nominally of sedimentary
rock, but any geologist would have taken one look and told
you at once that these rocks were to the sedimentary classification as the nouveau riche were to the Four Hundred. The
Point Venuti Highlands were really nothing but mud with a
hard-on and now they cracked and split in a thousand crazy
directions. For a moment they held, the new cracks opening
and closing like gasping mouths, and then they began to collapse in landslides on the town. Showers of dirt came sifting down. Amid the dirt were boulders as big as Toledo tire-factories.
Morgan’s Wolf Brigade had been decimated by Jack and
Richard’s surprise attack on Camp Readiness. Now the
number was even further reduced as many of them ran
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screaming and wailing in superstitious fear. Some catapulated back into their own world. Some of these got away, but most were swallowed by the upheavals that were happening there.
A core of similar cataclysms ran from this place through all the worlds, as if punched through by a surveyor’s hollow sampling rod. One group of three Wolfs dressed in Fresno
Demons motorcycle jackets gained their car—a horny old
Lincoln Mark IV—and managed to drive a block and a half
with Harry James bellowing brass out of the tapedeck before a chunk of stone fell from the sky and crushed the Connie
flat.
Others simply ran shrieking in the streets, their Change beginning. The woman with the chains in her nipples strolled
serenely in front of one of these. She was serenely ripping her hair out in great chunks. She held one of these chunks out to the Wolf. The bloody roots wavered like the tips of sea-grass as she waltzed in place on the unsteady earth.
“Here!” she cried, smiling serenely. “A bouquet! For you!”
The Wolf, not a bit serene, tore her head off with a single snap of his jaws and ran on, on, on.
3
Jack studied what he had captured, as breathless as a child who has a shy woodland creature come out of the grass and
eat from his hand.
It glowed between his palms, waxing and waning, waxing
and waning.
With my heartbeat, he thought.
It seemed to be glass, but it had a faintly yielding feeling in his hands. He pressed and it gave a little. Color shot inward from the points of his pressure in enchanting billows: inky blue from his left hand, deepest carmine from the right. He smiled . . . and then the smile faded.
You may be killing a billion people doing that—fires,
floods, God knows what. Remember the building that col-
lapsed in Angola, New York, after—
No, Jack, the Talisman whispered, and he understood why it had yielded to the gentle pressure of his hands. It was alive; of course it was. No, Jack: All will be well . . . all will be
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well . . . and all manner of things will be well. Only believe; be true; stand; do not falter now.
Peace in him—oh such deep peace.
Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow, Jack thought, and wondered if he could ever bring himself to let this wondrous bauble go.
4
On the beach below the wooden walk, Gardener had fallen
flat on his belly in terror. His fingers hooked into the loose sand. He was mewling.
Morgan reeled toward him like a drunk and ripped the
pack-set from Gardener’s shoulder.
“Stay outside!” he roared into it, and then realized he had forgotten to press the SEND button. He did it now. “STAY
OUTSIDE! IF YOU TRY TO GET OUT OF TOWN THE
MOTHERFUCKING CLIFFS WILL FALL ON YOU! GET
DOWN HERE! COME TO ME! THIS IS NOTHING BUT A
BUNCH OF GODDAM SPECIAL EFFECTS! GET DOWN
HERE! FORM A RING AROUND THE BEACH! THOSE OF
YOU WHO COME WILL BE REWARDED! THOSE OF YOU
WHO DON’T WILL DIE IN THE PITS AND IN THE
BLASTED LANDS! GET DOWN HERE! IT’S OPEN! GET
DOWN HERE WHERE NOTHING CAN FALL ON YOU! GET
DOWN HERE, DAMMIT!”
He threw the pack-set aside. It split open. Beetles with
long feelers began to squirm out by the dozens.
He bent down and yanked the howling, whey-faced Gar-
dener up. “On your feet, beautiful,” he said.
5
Richard cried out in his unconsciousness as the table he was lying on bucked him off onto the floor. Jack heard the cry, and it dragged him out of his fascinated contemplation of the Talisman.
He became aware that the Agincourt was groaning like a
ship in a high gale. As he looked around, boards snapped up, revealing dusty beamwork beneath. The beams were sawing
back and forth like shuttles in a loom. Albino bugs scuttered and squirmed away from the Talisman’s clear light.
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“I’m coming, Richard!” he shouted, and began to work his way back across the floor. He was thrown over once and he
went down holding the glowing sphere high, knowing it was
vulnerable—if it was hit hard enough, it would break. What
then, God knew. He got to one knee, was thrown back down
on his butt, and lurched to his feet again.
From below, Richard screamed again.
“Richard! Coming!”
From overhead, a sound like sleigh-bells. He looked up
and saw the chandelier penduluming back and forth, faster
and faster. Its crystal pendants were making that sound. As Jack watched, the chain parted and it hit the unravelling floor like a bomb with diamonds instead of high explosive in its
nose. Glass flew.
He turned and exited the room in big, larruping strides—
he looked like a burlesque comic doing a turn as a drunken
sailor.
Down the hall. He was thrown against first one wall
and then the other as the floor seesawed and split open. Each time he crashed into a wall he held the Talisman out from
him, his arms like tongs in which it glowed like a white-hot coal.
You’ll never make it down the stairs.
Gotta. Gotta.
He reached the landing where he had faced the black
knight. The world heaved a new way; Jack staggered and saw
the helmet on the floor below roll crazily away.
Jack continued to look down. The stairs were moving in
great tortured waves that made him feel like puking. A stair-level snapped upward, leaving a writhing black hole.