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TO BE A GOD



Pertos was a god, of sorts. Aided only by an idiot who nurtured a dark secret, Pertos created living
puppets from the Furnace. Puppets complete with intellect and emotions, lusts and fears.



 But it was not easy to be a god. The puppets had to go back into the Furnace when their task was done.
If one created, one also had to destroy.



In fact, sometimes it was dangerous to be a god. What if one's creations did not wish to be destroyed . .
.?



THE FLESH IN THE FURNACE




RLI: VLM 7 (VLR 6-9)

    IL 9-up




THE FLESH IN THE FURNACE

A Bantam Book / published tune 1972




All rights reserved.
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Copyright Q 1972 by Dean Koontz.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or to part, by

mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For Information address: Bantam Books, Inc.

Published simultaneously to the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc., a National

General company. Its trade-mark, consisting of the words "Bantam

Books' and the portrayal of a antam, is registered to the United

States Patent Office and in other countries.



Marco Registrada.



Bantam Books, Inc.

666 Fifth Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10019.



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




Here is a passion play in five acts of Chinese theater, a cold story for warm people Harry and Diane
Record.
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September



     The idiot and the puppeteer rode in the cab of the truck, staring ahead at the darkness and the
steadily unrolling gray of the ancient road they followed. The idiot's name was Sebastian, an unfortunate
one for him. In one sense, such a name implied a weightiness of personality and a richness of detail. The
idiot, however, was devoid of idiosyncrasy. On the other hand, a Sebastian might be expected to exhibit
a cheerfulness, a certain Alan. But the idiot was most often somber with the press of insoluble
irrelevancies, his black eyes staring from beneath the shelf of bone that was his forehead, his too-full lips
somewhat loose and his pale hands limp upon his massive thighs.

    The puppeteer, though, was equal to his appellation. His mother had called him Pertos, after the star
legend of Pertos of Arima who had charmed a world with smiles and warm eyes. His father had
contributed the surname of Godelhausser before abandoning mother and child, but few used that, the first
name being so accurate. Even now, Pertos smiled as he watched the concrete rush under the blades of
the air cushion system, illuminated for a brief moment by the yellow lances of the headlamps. It was not
that Pertos Godelhausser was a man of humorous disposition. Indeed, he found little to be gay about
these days, as old age approached and fortune fled. It was just that, in repose, his face took on the
pattern of a smile.

    "Tell be 'bout it," Sebastian said, scrunched so far down in the seat that only his head remained above
the dash.

   "About what?" Godelhausser asked. The idiot had been overly pensive the last few hours, which
meant he was wrestling with some problem or other.

    "The city," Sebastian said.

   It was not the thing that bothered the brute. Pertos could see that. But he did not mind talking to
Sebastian, even when it was a one-sided conversation. "I've told you a hundred times, I think.

    "Again?"

    The puppeteer sighed and leaned back against the cool black plastic of the seat, stretching his neck
and shoulders. Once more, he considered the blessing it would be if the idiot could drive. Having given
Sebastian the wheel once before, he hastily rejected any notion of repeating that disastrous experiment.
"Very well," he said. In truth, he was anxious to hear himself talk, anything to break the dreary hum of the
rotars whirling beneath them, to shatter the monotonous pessimism of his private thoughts.

    "Slowly," Sebastian warned.

    "Surely. So . . . The city is called Springsun, but wasn't always. Ages ago, before the Emigration from
Earth, it was called Boston. It was dirtier then. Shabbier."

    "I like Springsun more," Sebastian said, shaking his head in agreement with himself.

    "I would think so," Pertos said. "I find it too sweet, myself."

    "What?"
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    "Never mind. You're not interested in my opinions. Only in the story."

    "Tell me."

    "Four hundred years ago, just before Emigration, when Earth was the only world and the stars were
cold and distant, Boston was a piece of Hell. You know about Hell. Ugly clouds of smoke, noxious
fumes, filthy drinking water. Homes were insulated against the tremendous noise of an overpopulated
world. Nature collapsed and so did society. Everywhere, small groups with their own interests did
subtle--and later not so subtle-battle with one another"

    "Who was the hero?" Sebastian asked.

    "No hero. Champions exist only in fairy tales, and the story of Springsun is true." Pertos did not
pretend that the idiot understood all these fine points, though he continued. "Instead of one saviour there
was an agglomerate hero, many men working together. They opened the way to the stars, and. tens of
millions followed them. The wonders of the universe were irresistible, as was the untainted air of
untouched worlds. In time, only a few remained. But those few were stubborn, and they scrubbed the
atmosphere and purified the water until everything was as it is today, all within a century and a half."

    "Where are the people?" Sebastian asked.

   "Never returned. The air was clean, the water pure, and the cities had been rebuilt into splendor and
mystery. But no one wanted Earth. To shrug off the old image, the cities were renamed and advertising
campaigns were launched. But only a few thousand have ever trickled homeward."

    "You did," Sebastian said.

     Pertos sighed. "Yes, and I was foolish. Rumor said every man on Earth was rich, and that alien forms
of entertainment were welcomed. So I brought my puppets to make my thousands. And I have made
thousands. But I didn't know about the departure fee which makes it impossible for all but the richest
immigrants ever to return to the stars. They're determined to keep every man here, even if he'd rather go
to the stars to die."

    "I'll die here," Sebastian said.

    For the first time, he looked at Pertos. The green glow from the control console washed across his
pallid face, made his eyes seem strangely alive.

    "Yes," Pertos agreed. "But you were born here, and that makes a difference."

   "Where were you born?" Sebastian asked, his voice a slow, measured base as he struggled with each
word.

    "In the city of Blackfawn on the planet Uri-two which circles a sun called Ozalius." He looked at the
idiot and frowned at the incomprehension he saw there. "I was born near a far star. And I've been
trapped on this godforsaken ball of mud for five years now, trying to scrape up a bit of money to pay
departure fees and be gone. And I haven't anything to show for it."

    "You have me," Sebastian said.
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    Pertos smiled. It was a genuine smile this time, not an accident of his features. "True enough."

     They rode on in silence, watching the darkness blur past them. In time, the idiot dug his left hand into
the pocket of his slacks and took out a plastic card. On one side was his picture, his name and a few bits
and pieces about his life. He read these with fascination, for he always found something new to ponder
over. On the reverse face of the card, there was a simply worded message for him which told him he
came from Soldiersville, Kentucky, his hometown, should he ever wish to return there. It also explained
how he could contact government representatives for sickness insurance or for pension movies. He read
all this twice, which took a long while, then replaced the card in his pocket.

    "Were you really born . . . in the stars?" he asked Pertos.

    "Yes," Godelhausser answered. He no longer felt like

carrying on a conversation. Even his permanent smile had a bitter look to it.

    "Imagine," Sebastian said.

    "Imagine what?"

    "The stars. Who would ever think . . .from stars?"

    They rode.

    "Who would ever?" Sebastion asked later. "Stars?"

    There were a great many trees in Springsun, especially along the avenues before and behind the
cultural center. In the darkness of that early autumn morning the trees rustled overhead like conspiratorial
old women and shed a few

leaves on the heads of the puppeteer and the idiot.

     The lowering sky rumbled with distant thunder, and the clouds seemed to skim along the peaks of the
tallest structures. The air was chilly,and it forced Pertos to stand sheltered by the ogee door of the cargo
hold of his truck, t his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat, shivering, daring from one foot to
the other to generate a little heat.

   Sebastian labored to unload the contents of the van and transport everything inside to the theater's
guest quarters. He had carried all their personal belongings inside and was now finislitag with the
Furnace, which he handled with

great care even though he knew the pieces were unbreakable.

    As he waited for the idiot to return to take the last piece, Pertos heard footsteps. the stone of the
plaza floor that connected all the buildings in the cultural complex. He stepped aroud the end of the truck
and watched them:

three men their midthirties, all lean and handsome, if somewhat harshly dressed is a severity that was not
normal

far Earth whom all manner of alien designs were imported and worn.
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    They stopped half a dozen feet before him. "Pertos Godelhausser?" the tallest of the trio asked.

    He nodded.

    "The puppeteer," the tallest said.

    Since it was not a question, he said nothing.

"My name is Trimkin. I'm President of Springsun's chapter of the Heritage League. I imagine you've
heard of us."

    "Once or twice," Pertos said.

   Trimkin smiled, a graceful and self-possessed man. In the short time since he had begun to speak, his
companions seemed to lose color, shrink and fade by comparison. "Then you know why I'm here."

    "No. Your people are always speech-making. I never listened. Rhetoric has bored me for as long as
I can remember."

     Trimkin grew taut, like a wire suddenly stretched, though his face remained impassive and his manner
polite. "I'll be brief. Our organization is small but growing. Our purpose is to banish all art forms of alien
origin and to nurture those arts which are indiginant to Earth. Since the Emigration, our cultural heritage
has grown poorer. For the last two hundred years, Earth's painting has been a derivative of the work of
off-world painters. Her music is pattered after that imported from Pino, Bleden and Treelight. All our
culture is imitation, and we grow shallower year by year. The sensitive young people finally manage to
Emigrate. And until Earth has her own rich culture, they won't return, and the younger ones will continue
to leave when they come of age and make money."

    "Excuse me," Pertos said. "But I've already begun to let my mind wander"

    Color rose on Trimkin's cheeks. "I'll try to be more specific. Don't perform here. Pack your things
and leave"

    Irritated, Pertos shook his head. "I have to eat, and I want to leave Earth. Both require money."

    "We could pay...."

    "How much?"

    "A thousand postals"

    "I'd make ten times that much in a week here, and still it would be a pittance!"

    "Ten thousand, then," Trimkin said.

    Pertos smiled grimly. "You would have bought me at a dishonest price if I had been witless enough to
accept, eh?"

    Trimkin shrugged. Suddenly, his aristocratic bearing made Pertos feel angry, used. "If you want me
off Earth so bad, why not just get the departure fees lifted for me?"
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    "We haven't got many people in high office. And even our ranks are split on that issue. But some day
we'll be able to do as you ask."

    "Well," Pertos said, "until you can, I'd thank you to stop bothering me with speeches."

    "Perhaps more than speeches are required," Trimkin said.

    "I'd advise against foolishness," Pertos warned. He withdrew a sleek pistol from his overcoat pocket.
It was plainly not of Earth design, and no man there wanted to test it to see what results it might have.

    Trimkin and his companions looked at Sebastian who had just returned from the theater.

    "If you want to take on Sebastian, go ahead," Pertos said. "He isn't well educated, but he has other
abilities that compensate for that. He moves slowly, but strikes hard. As for my equipment, the
Furnace-which you have surely been considering-it's protected by an Olmesclan amoeba which is coded
to Sebastian and me. Anyone else will find theft or vandalism quite painful"

    For half a minute they continued to confront each other.

    Blue lightning coursed across the low clouds, and the first fat raindrops began to fall.

   "We'll be to a performance or two," Trlmkin said. He nodded to both Pertos and Sebastian, then
walked away, across the plaza. His companions followed like mute, synthetic creatures, though they
were not.

    "Trouble?" Sebastian asked.

    "No more than usual. Come on. Let's get inside before the worst of this storm hits us."

    They ran up the steps of the side entrance to the Grande Theater in Blue, through the hexagonal
crimson doors and under the roof of their haven for the following week.



    Sebastian could not sleep. It was not that he was afraid of the Heritage League-he had all but
forgotten about them. It was just that he felt somehow unfinished for the day, as if he were hungry, though
he was not.

     He left his mom and wandered away from Pertos' chamber. He passed empty actors' quarters, made
his . way through storage vaults of old costumes that had been sewn and hung in anticipation of the lavish
shows that would be performed when Earth's children returned from the stars. Many of them were
rotted. In time, he crossed the boards and reached the footlights of the main stage. There, he looked out
across the darkened hall at the empty seats.

    He wished there were people here.

    Perhaps that would make him feel better.

    He went on the floor and sat in the front row and tried to pretend he was watching a performance in
the midst of a large audience. He smiled at those to either side of him. No one smiled in return.
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     In the rear of the auditorium he found the stairs which led to the lightman's perch. He took them two
at a time.

    Up there, he sat behind the largest spotlight.

    After a long search, he located the machine's switch. It was on the top, directly in front of his face, a
small gray toggle. He laughed at himself for having so much trouble finding something so obvious. He
turned the spot on.

    Yellow light sizzled down to the black stage. A curiously perfect circle appeared there, as if a hole
had been carved in the boards to allow a hidden sun to show through.

    He watched for a while, then changed the yellow gel for a blue one and settled back on his chair.

    He felt an excitement he could not explain.

    His hands shook on the cold grips of the spotlight casing.

    It wasn't often that he could explain why he felt happy sad or tense or relaxed. He never tried to
analyze, merely accepted.

    In a way, the feeling he had now was like that he had had when he had fallen off a theater scaffold in
Brightwater and had broken his leg. Falling, he had been certain he was dying. It had not been fear so
much, more of a long, sighing release of anxiety.

    The theater was quiet now.

    The center of the stage glimmered bluely as Sebastian waited for someone to come out there and
begin doing something. But who?

    Then he remembered that blue was the color that ended the story of Bitty Belina, when she stands in
sequined gown on a small pedestal with her prince kneeling before her and the body of her
demon-possessed stepmother lying with the prince's sword buried in its throat. The puppets f That was
what excited him. Tomorrow, the puppets would be forged in the furnace, and maybe Bitty Belina would
be among them.

    He slid off the stool and crossed the projection room in the dark. He stumbled once, fell. But he did
not waste time feeling sorry for himself. He got up and untangled the cord from his feet, went downstairs.
He crossed the theater and climbed onto the stage and stood in the circle of blue light and waited.

    His flesh was blue. And if he pretended hard enough, he could believe he was small, a puppet. He
was the prince in the story of Bitty Belina, and he had saved her. And now when he looked at the boards
he could see Bitty Belina herself, poised on her dainty feet, her smooth legs strained taut, her yellow hair
to her shoulders, her eyes shining, her face turned toward him, beautiful, beautiful

    Then she was gone.

    He was alone.

    He got down on his hands and knees, but he could not find a single trace of her. And then he
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remembered that tonight was tonight and that Bitty Belina would not be forged until late tomorrow
afternoon, when Pertos stoked the furnace. If then.

    He walked back through the empty seats up the stairs to the projection room, and he turned out the
spotlight with the blue gel capped to the end of it.

   Ten minutes later he was in bed asleep. He knew that he would need all his energy to do well
tomorrow. He often got sleepy, but he could not let himself miss a moment of time with the puppets.

    He dreamed of Bitty Belina. She was dancing on a flower. In the dream, he had grown as small as
she and held her hand and laughed with her and fled from one bright petal to another, kicking droplets of
dew into the air . . .



    On the planet Shaftau, a world eight times the size of Earth with only twice her gravity, there lived a
race of creatures that men called spider-lizards and told many tales about. The spider-lizards called
themselves Vonopo and spoke little about themselves.

    The Vonopo were each as large as two men, with twelve spindly appendages not quite like arms and
not quite legs. Each appendage was tipped with a fleshy tool, each tool with a different purpose and
design, like fingers and yet utterly unlike fingers. Their skin was really scales and the color of polished
amber. They swallowed their food directly into their stomachs through a mouth on their bellies, and they
shivered in disgust at the thought that men fouled their vocal apparatus with food pulp.

    Despite this fierce appearance, the Vonopo were a gentle people who shied from publicity and
valued privacy above all else. Each lived separately in a subterranean warren, with all the comforts of a
super-technical society. If one Vonopoen met another more than twice in any single week, he felt it
necessary to purge himself with rituals no human had ever witnessed. No other race was permitted to live
on Shafta,u, for the Vonopoens had discovered that other species tended to curiosity and could not be
trusted to obey common rules of courtesy. Humans who wished to conduct business on Shaftau were
issued thirty-two-hour passes, one equivalent day on that slowly turning world. Violation of the pass
meant a permanent revocation of a human's right to visit Shaftau. And no man wished to lose that
privilege, for the Vonopoens made many marvelous and highly marketable items, among them the
Furnaces that produced the puppets.

    The Furnace came in nine pieces for easy transport, and very little skill was required to establish the
proper connections between the separate components. Also, very little skill was required to pry open the
casings of the machine and see what might whir and blink inside. But the moment any piece of the hull
was removed, the insides melted to slag that smoked and glowed and presented better protection for the
manufacturers than any number of patents might.

   Now, in the darkened room where Pertos had chosen to erect the Furnace, the process of creation
was about to

 begin. The Olmescian amoeba, all but invisible when spread over the machine, had now rolled to the
back and clung there in one gelatinous lump. The only light in the room came from the capsule-womb
faceplate and was a dull green.

   Sebastian sat in the corner on a stool, out of the way. He tried to remain as quiet as he could, for he
knew that Pertos would tell him to leave otherwise. Yet he found himself repeating lines from the script of
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Bitty Belina's story, mumbling them in complete accuracy, though he had never been able to memorize
anything in his life before, other than the way his name looked on paper.

    Pertos selected a wafer from the file of puppet identities on the side of the machine, frowned, then let
his smile return. He looked toward Sebastian as he replaced that wafer and chose another. He slipped
the disc into the memory translator above the Furnace, and the process of creation was begun.

   Sebastian was halfway off his stool before he remembered that silence and stillness were essential.
Carefully, he sat back, leaning against the wall, and watched the capsulewomb intently.

    Pertos worked the only two knobs on the machine, and slowly the green color changed to rich
crimson, working across the spectrum of colors. The crimson became white, and in that glare the pudding
of synthetic flesh jelly that was puddled in the forming tray began to take on a solidity. It began to mold,
without the help of a form, and soon was a faceless, womanly body, with pert little breasts and creased
vagina.

   Sebastian became excited, though not sexually, for that was beyond him. He strained to see more of
what transpired in the capsule-womb.

    The hair came next, on the head and below the belly: golden.

   It crinkled. It grew before his eyes. Like a thousand yellow snakes. And then it stopped and the face
came and it was her face with the incredibly blue eyes.

     Sebastian watched until she was fully formed, until her nose popped open with nostrils and her mouth
filled with teeth. Pertos removed her from the capsule-womb, a strange god with a businesslike sense
about creation, and placed her

in a nutrient bath which stimulated the nerve clusters in the outer layers of her unnatural flesh. Soon, she
was tossing this way and turning that, murmuring softly, fingers twitching as she grasped at dreams of
death as if refusing to accept the life so suddenly flooding into her.

     More of the synthetic flesh, in its liquid form, spilled into the capsule-womb, and the cycle was begun
again as Pertos chose the next wafer from the identity file and fed the disc to the machine. But Sebastian
did not care about the creation of the prince of the demon-possessed stepmother, of the good angel or
the three suitors who came before the prince in the story. Bitty Belina, was alive, and that was all that
really mattered.

    He wanted to get up.

    He dared not; Pertos would send him out.

    He wanted to touch her hair.

    He was afraid to.

    He watched.

    And as the light flickered from green to crimson to white and the making of life from the Vonopoen
synthetic flesh continued, as other small bodies, each no smaller than eighteen inches and no taller than
twenty-four, were laid in the nutrient bath trays, strange images shot through the idiot's mind, sometimes
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dark and hideous, sometimes naive and gay, but always without coherence.

    Bitty Belina reminded Sebastian of someone . .. someone long ago and long gone, someone whose
phantom visage, resurrected in memory, was teasingly familiar and yet utterly strange. He remembered
golden hair most of all. Bitty Belina, had it, and so did the girl in the past, curls and curls of it. Somehow
he was certain he had been close to the unremembered yellow-haired girl, very close, painfully close-and
abruptly, painfully separated by the sound of a sharp twig cracking underfoot, though it was not a twig
but something else. What had it been? What had taken the blonde girl from him? And who had she been?
Bitty Belina?

    The prince lay in the nutrient bath alongside Bitty Belina and her three unsuccessful suitors.

    The good angel was being created now.

    Golden wings were forming in the womb.

   Golden hair. The sharp sound, snapping. And blood. Yes, yes, lots of blood, running down his right
hand, soaking his shirt sleeve. And the golden girl was looking down at his hand and at herself, and she
was still laughing and he was laughing and then she was screaming and he was laughing and then she was
gagging and he was getting scared and then she was . . . she was dead.

But who?

    Sitting here now, he felt guilty, though he could notr understand why. He felt as if he had sneaked
some money from Pertos' lockbox to buy candy. He had done that once. And felt awful and sorry when
he was caught. But this guilty-it was worse. Much worse. It hurt.

    The winged angel lay in a nutrient bath himself, his lovely appendages draped across the edges of the
pan. Behind closed eyelids, his eyeballs moved spasmodically. It was hard to let go of non-being and
accept the role of life in all its facets.

    In the capsule-womb, the stepmother formed.

     Sebastian felt a kinship for her, knowing both were guilty. But her guilt, he realized, was much easier
to take than his, for she knew what she had done. And he did not.

    He tried to remember the bleeding girl and the blood on his hand and the laughing and the screaming.
But it hurt, and his eyes fogged, and his jaw went loose. He couldn't remember. He stopped trying, and
he felt so much better that he resolved never to think of that memory again.

    He had made the same resolution hundreds of times before, though he never remembered it.

    At last, all the characters for the story of Bitty Belina were lined up in nutrient baths. Bitty Belina
herself had sat up and was looking about at the dark room and the shapes of the puppet master and the
idiot. Her eyes were very wide, and she kept brushing herself as if there were dust all over her, though
that could not be.

    Pertos closed down the Furnace, deposited all the identity wafers in the file again and touched the
Olmesclan amoeba in the proper rhythm, causing it to spread out over the Furnace like a film of water,
until it was not visible. He turned around, looked at the puppets. His face was drawn, and his large eyes
looked sick, like a man bearing too much of a burden.
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    "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
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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.

    Suddenly she turned and faced Sebastian, and in his mind, there was blood pumping out of her
stomach and she was not Bitty Belina any more, but a girl named jenny. And he gurgled and looked
away from her, blinking, crying, but no longer remembering what had stirred him so deeply. The flash of
memory was gone. Jenny? Just a name.

    "Where is Master Godelhausser?" she asked Sebastian.

    Her voice, though small, was not tinny. It did not screech or whine as she spoke. It was a womanly
voice in the sense that some little girls, when breathless, sound very adult and somehow sensuous.

   Sebastian waved his arms, pointing nowhere, and finally managed to say, "With the lights. As
always."

   His throat ached, as if each one of the sharp-edged words had torn chunks of flesh loose on their
way from his body to Bitty Belina. He coughed, dry and racking, making his eyes water.

    She had her tiny hands on her hips now. Her white, mid-thigh skirt rustled as if made of paper, and it
thrust out stiffly over the pert curve of her small buttocks. "Damn him! He promised us we'd have a new
ending in the script, like we want, and then he disappears before he comes throughl"

    "New ending?" Sebastian asked. He could not understand what she meant, for the story of Bitty
Belina was a permanent cycle with him, and the notion that it could be changed was alien and
unfathomable. One might as well say the sun will rise in the north and settle in the east or that cows will
now fly and birds will give milk henceforth.

    "We don't want Wissa killed in the end," Belina explained, indicating the wickedly beautiful,
dark-haired and sloe-eyed villainess.

  "But she . , wants you dead I" Sebastian blurted, amazed at the blonde puppet's concern for an evil
woman lie this.

    "Only in the script," Belina said.

    "It hurts so," Wissa explained. "It hurts with the sword in my neck, because I don't die very fast. And
every time I'm created, it's all just waiting until I die:"

   "We are people," Belina said. Her pretty face was not as pretty as it usually was, he noticed. "We're
made on a pattern designed according to human gene structure. We're complete, with brains and
emotions-'
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    "Oh, hell, he's retarded," the prince said. "What are you all standing around talking to an idiot for?"

    Sebastian wanted to squash the prince. He could have, too. One swift kick against the wall, a heel
brought down hard

    Belina stamped her feet, spat on the floorboards, leaving

 a little spot of glistening saliva there, a dew drop. "We'll put it to Godelhausser tonight. Wissa, it will be
the last time. That old bastard isn't going to keep sacrificing you for showmanshipl"

    "He'll refuse to change it," Wissa Said. "Some patrons like the blood in the end. He's said so before."

    "Then we won't perform!" Belina snapped.

   "Yeah?" the prince asked. "And how do you plan to refuse him when he is four times taller than you,
when you can't run more than a thousand yards, and when he can refuse you food or water and let you
dehydrate until you're too weak to resist?"

     "Or," one of the three suitors offered, "if we push him too hard on it, perhaps he'll just stow us back
in the Furnace, return us to plasm, and never use our story again. And that's as good as a permanent
death. At least Wissa is always reborn."

    Listening, Sebastian was horror-stricken at such a possibility, and he felt his bladder weakening as he
anticipated never seeing Bitty Belina again, never hearing that whispered voice in another show.

    "We could kill the old bastard 1" Belina growled, her face furiously red now, her hands fisted on her
hips.

   The prince slid his hands around her, from the back, cupping her pert little breasts, chewing on her
neck. "Calm, Belina. Don't louse up all we have and give us nothing in return."

    "I suppose," she said, pouting her lips.

    One of his hands slid between the buttons of her blouse, and the rounded mound of one breast was
partially visible.

    Sebastian wanted to squash him, though he felt terribly guilty about harboring such desires. And, too,
while he hated the prince and the way the prince touched Belina (and hated, even more, the way she
reacted, cooing, giggling, enjoying it), chiefly because he could not understand what they were doing, he
was not of a mind to take any action because of the bigger fear: that Pertos would deposit them in the
Furnace and never bring them out again.

    They would be dead. Forever. Liquid flesh without feature.

    Dead and forever and no more blond hair and bright eyes.

   Because all this upset him so much, he had had an "accident" and he felt miserable. He wanted to
change clothes, but he knew he shouldn't leave the stage until the curtain went up and he knew that there
were no last-minute hitches.

    By now the puppets had seen what had happened, were pointing and laughing at the dark wet
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streaks down his pantleg. He saw that even Bitty Belina was laughing, and he was even more upset at this
until he decided that, after all, it was funny, his standing there like that, all wet and embarrassed. So he
laughed too.

   He didn't want to laugh, really. It was just that not laughing would have made things so much worse.
Not laughing would have made him different and made him outside their fun. And he wanted to be inside
more than anything else in the world. He always had, but he had never often succeeded in acting right.

    Now he was. They all laughed together.

    Fortunately, the curtain went up as Pertos operated the controls from the lightman's perch, and the
play began. He could stop laughing when he didn't want to, and there was no longer any need for him to
remain in the wings. Pertos said he should stay there as a communications link before a curtain rose, but
Pertos had never called him in five years. He went to his room and changed trousers, which made him
feel better. He came back to watch the puppets kissing and fighting, drinking and singing and dancing.
Then there was the final shriek of the evil stepmother as the prince drove his sword through Wissa's
neck.

    The audience gasped.

    Belina stepped from her pedestal and took the prince away, to make love to him, and the curtain fell
with a whispering hiss that signaled the time for applause.

    It was a good performance and Sebastian felt good.

   He had forgotten that the puppets had wanted the ending of the play changed, but he remembered
when Belina cursed him as he picked up Wissa's remains and carried the shattered little body to the
Furnace where Pertos would redeposit it and re-create her for the next show.

    "You could kill him," she said.

    "Who?"

    "Godelhausser," Belina said.

    She looked up at him from a great distance.

    "No." He put Wissa down on the receival tray.

    "Yes. You're big and strong. You could kill him for us. For me" The last was added in a different
tone of voice. He felt her hand on his trousers, and he pulled quickly away, terrified but not knowing of
what.

    Then Godelhausser came and the puppets turned on him, and Sebastian relaxed, a spectator again.

   Belina shrieked and spat and cursed. She kicked at Godelhausser's shins, but to no avail. The winged
angel fluttered at face level, arguing the humanity of letting Wissa live, but he was brushed aside. Wissa
was created, found nothing had changed and shrugged at the prospect of another death. Tonight, at least,
Godelhausser would recreate her and she would know some joy with the others until tomorrow's matinee
when she would feel the blade again.
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    Sebastian watched, grinning.

    He was glad that Pertos was not angry with them, for otherwise he might never create them again.
Pertos seemed to take it in stride, seemed even to enjoy it. He could not be upset or angry. He smiled.
Pertos smiled. That made Sebastian feel good.



    Alvon Rudi was splendidly dressed in amber and blue, with a trailing cape, epaulets of silver, with
many buttons and four buckles across each black boot. If he was too heavy, it could be forgiven because
he had a certain self-possession, a certain sophistication that made the extra pounds seem beneficial, like
extra muscles or an abundance of wit. He was like most Earthmen, save that he was richer. He was a
merchant of some sort, dealing solely with intercontinental trade on the motherworid, though this limited
yard had done him well.

     He had come to wait backstage after the second performance, even though Sebastian had made it
plain, after some time, that Pertos would be a while. When Pertos arrived and said Wissa must be
re-created before he could talk to anyone, Rudi was understanding. He watched the other puppets with a
curious intensity, always smiling but never looking very happy. Then Wissa was alive again and the
puppets went to their own room with cheese and meat, bread and cake, two bottles of wine each half as
tall as the prince. They went laughing, making rude jokes, and finally left the three grown men in silence
that had a disturbing quality to it.

    "So like children," Alvon Rudi said. "So alive and bright, yet adults really, eh?"

    "Physical adults. But a strange combination of adult and child in their minds. Since I bought the
identity wafers, I have used them in perhaps two hundred performances. They have been alive for a total
of no more than a hundred and twenty days. In chronological sense, then, they are infants, newly born.
But the Vonopoens give them personalities, make them adults in a way, though the knowledge is
imprinted on their wafers and it is not something they learn through experience. So though they grasp
most things on the level of adults, they have a childlike exuberance and naivety."

     Sebastian attempted to follow all of this, but he could not. He had seldom heard Godelhausser talk at
such length to strangers. Usually he was short and somewhat mean. Now he rattled away as if he wanted
to talk only to keep Alvon Rudi from speaking, as if he might be afraid of what the merchant had come to
say.

    "Would you like some wine?" Pertos asked.

    "A small glass."

    "Me too?" Sebastian asked.

    "Another small glass," Pertos said, pouring the idiot's first. "And be careful not to spill it, or you'll get
nothing else."

    "I will," Sebastian said, tasting the wine.

    As Alvon Rudi accepted a glass of the black drink, he said, looking at Sebastian, "He would seem to
be a strange
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assistant."

     "The government classifies him as an idiot," Pertos said. "But he has moments of insight, flashes rather
brilliant. He may be what they say, but he is sometimes more."

    "Often?"

    "Rarely."

    "Then why?" Rudi asked.

    "He is also cheap," Pertos said. "And as I am saving for the damn departure fees, I scrimp."

    Rudi drank his wine, watching Godelhausser over the brim of the glass.

    Pertos looked back. He seemed uneasy, as if he had an important engagement he must soon make,
though all the night contained for him now was a late meal, a session with the Holistian Pearl and sleep.

   "I have a proposition for you," Alvon Rudi said, putting his glass down on a polished, yellow enamel
end table.

Pertos nodded.

    "Do you rent the puppets out? For other shows beyond your schedule?" He spoke, Sebastian
thought, as if there were a secret that only he and the puppet master knew. Sebastian tried to imagine
what the secret was, but he couldn't think very dearly. It took very little wine to affect him, and already
he had drunk half the glass.

    "We perform for private parties," Godelhausser said. "The price would depend upon the distance of
travel, for the Furnace must be transported wherever the puppets go. It would also, of course, depend
on the number of the little simulacrums you would want, what the play you would like would demand."

    "One," Alvon Rudi said.

    "I have no play for a single puppet"

    "I would write it," Rudi said.

   "I imagine you have chosen the puppet," Godelhausser said, very sad now, very quiet, his voice
almost inaudible.

    "Bitty Belina," the merchant said.

   Sebastian grew more interested now. His wine was gone, and he wanted more, so he went over and
poured himself some. He felt good that he had not slopped any. Pertos got angry when he spilled.

    "I imagine your curtain time will be odd."

    "All night, of course," Rudi Said.

    "And you would pay a high ticket."
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    "Ten thousand postals."

    "Twenty thousand," Godelhausser Said.

    "Very well. It should be a unique experience, well worth the extra money, even though I will not
actually know her, eh?"

    "I'm sorry," Godelhausser said. It was obvious that he required an effort to say no to the merchant.

    "You won't rent?"

    "I won't "

    "Twenty-five thousand, then."

    "I'm very sorry. For both of us."

    Rudi rose, twisted his shoulders so his cape was flung back, the wrinkles flowing out of it like ripples
disappearing across the surface of a pond after a stone has been tossed. "You'll never make departure
fees otherwise, you know."

    "Perhaps,"

   Rudi shrugged. He was not angry. Impatient, perhaps, restless with the certainty that he would get
what he wanted sooner or later, disturbed that time and effort must be wasted to achieve what he
wished. "I'll try again tomor-row evening. Perhaps circumstances will have changed."

     "No," Godelhausser said. His voice was now so slight, so wavery that it seemed not to be a voice at
all, but the stirring of a breeze across a series of open pipes.

    "I'll return just the same," Alvon Rudi said. He nodded curtly and left them.

Sebastian finished his drink. "What he want?" he asked Godelhausser.

    The old man had fumbled his Holistian Pearl from his pocket and was beginning to rub it between his
fingers. He had not even eaten yet.

    "What he want?" Sebastian insisted.

    "My soul," Pertos said. "But I wouldn't give it to him" Then the Pearl sent dreams to him as it reached
energy storage capacity, and he seemed to enter a trance.

 Sebastian left the room because it scared him when the puppet master was holding the Pearl, his hands
rolling it automatically while his eyes were closed and his thoughts were lightyears away. He went down
the hall and stopped before the closed door of the puppets' room. He could hear their laughter, husky
little voices, the clink of their small glasses that Pertos supplied them. Wissa squealed in de-light, and he
wondered what game they were playing. When he tried the door, it was locked.

    He went to his own room, staggering a little.
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 He laid his identification cards in his single suitcase, a nightly ritual, and fell into bed with his clothes on.
There was a faint smell of urine, and he remembered his soiled pants. But he was too tired to get up and
drop them into the sonic cleaner in the wall. The smell and his exhaustion, coupled with his inability to join
the puppets or Pertos made him feel more lonely and desperate than he had ever felt before in his life.

Even so, he slept.



    Jenny was laughing, dodging from tree to tree. She wore a slouch hat and carried a gun made of
plastic that shot sponge pellets at him. She was the spy, she said, though he did not know what a spy
was. It was his job, she said, to capture her.

    They were running, laughing, hiding from each other, jumping out to scare each other, running more.

    And then . . .

    And then he caught her, caught the spy, before she could shoot him, like he was supposed to do ....

    Only . . . only she had bled . . . and died . . . shooting him with those sponge-rubber pellets . . .
alternately begging for help . . . get help . . . run for help . . . tell them . . . about help. .

     But he couldn't do it. He was scared of what they would do to him. Other spies might come and try
to kill him for getting their spy.

    And then she was quiet, dead. And he got rid of her and went home and when they asked him where
she was, where the spy was, he told them a story, because there had to be a story, but it was a broken
story and he knew they wouldn't believe him, would send spies . . . and he would be killed and would
bleed like Jenny and would . . . would . . . die....

     He woke up to some loud noise. He sat up after a while, after the dream was all gone, and he
listened to see if he could hear it again. He could not. He went to sleep again.

     In the morning, when be opened his door, he found Pertos Godelhausser lying on the corridor floor,
all bloody and unconscious. Down the hall there was a trail of blood to show how the old man had
crawled all this way for help. Sebastian felt a momentary wash of overwhelming incompe-tency that he
had not provided help. He was desperately sorting through his shattered mind for a plan, for something to
do with the body, when Pertos raised his head and asked for help. He wasn't dead yet!

Sebastian bent to the old man. "What?"

    "My room. The autodoc. I couldn't get into it myself."

    Sebastian did not understand what the autodoc was until Pertos explained it was the same machine
that had fixed his broken leg. And since the idiot remembered that so clearly, he could now operate, if
only by routine.

 `With Pertos directing him, he managed to get the retreival tray out of the autodoc, and he lifted Pertos
onto it with ease. After an embarrassing and interminable clum-siness, he worked the security belt
through its clamps across the puppet master's chest. He shoved the tray into the wall slot from which he
had withdrawn it. The machine swallowed Pertos smoothly and began making diagnostic sounds as if it
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were digesting him.

    Exhausted, the idiot sank into a chair and watched the wall, unable to understand why Pertos should
be bloody and what the old man might have done to cause such a disaster.

    After a while, he ate.

    He thought about Bitty Belina.

    For a time, he almost forgot that the puppet master was in the autodoc. When be rose to go look for
Pertos, he remembered and felt sheepish and sat down to wait a while longer.

    Time seemed to pass slowly.

    In the adjoining room, puppets were giggling . . . .



    Pertos had a huge appetite when he was released by the computerized physician some four hours
later. He was healed; the scars were gone. He had lost six pounds as the sutodoc had forced his body to
contribute to the accelerat-ed healing processes by burning some of its stored fat. He ordered several
steaming meals from the central grocery delivery bank, and the plastic containers of hot food slipped
from the pneumatic tubes into the delivery recepta-cle. He spread these out on the table, opened them
and devoured the contents with an enthusiasm he felt for few things these days.

    Sebastian watched him, curious but asking no questions.

   "Better," Pertos said when he had finished half the food, before him and was toying with his glass of
wine now more than with fork and spoon.

    "What?" Sebastian asked, taking the old man's breach of silence as a cue for his own inquisitiveness.

    "Heritage Leaguers. They came on me by surprise."

    "Why?"

    Pertos pushed away from the table, his face suddenly clouding. He looked at the door joining his
room to the room the puppets occupied. The sound of merriment came through the thin portal. Wissa
was laughing, and two of the three suitors were shouting in some game or other. Belina's own whispery
giggle came through now and then. Pertos approached the door, examined it, then spun the lock dial and
threw the door wide.

    The puppets stopped squealing, looked up at him. None of them were smiling. There was a litter of
tiny glasses and bits of food on the floor. Wissa was naked, stunningly dark and beautiful.

    Sebastian averted his eyes, though he was not sure why.

    "You let them in," Pertos said to the puppets.

    They watched him.
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    "You let them in your room and through the adjoining door"

    It was Bitty Belina who spoke. "Who?" she asked. But there was something about her tone that said
she already knew who.

   "The Heritage Leaguers. Trimkin and those four men he brought with him." Pertos wasn't Pertos,
because he wasn't smiling.

    "I don't know what you're talking about," Bitty Belina said.

   "When I crawled into the hall to get help it was because no one in your room seemed to hear me.
And when I had to go for Sebastian, I found my own door still locked, from the inside. So they came and
went somehow else."

    None of the puppets spoke.

    Wissa was slipping into clothes.

    The prince fingered his sword.

    And when Sebastian looked again, Bitty Belina was watching him. Her face held an expression of
utter con-tempt and loathing. It was not pretty at all, and it seemed to accuse him.

    "I didn't do any . . . anything," Sebastian said.

    "Exactly," Bitty Belina said.

    "What will you do to us?" Wissa asked, fully clothed now, addressing herself to the puppet master.

    Pertos looked at Bitty Belina. "There will be two shows tonight and a matinee this afternoon. But you
will work an extra show. And if you don't work it, I'll never call any of you out of the Furnace again."

    "What extra show?" Bitty Belina asked, her fisted hands on her hips, looking fierce-and just a bit
frightened.

    "You'll see," Pertos said. The smile returned, but it was a grim one. "It's sort of a command
performance, you might say. For an audience of one. I'll see you later:"

    He closed the door.

   Sebastian thought how much older Pertos looked, how much he seemed to have aged in only the last
few mo-ments.



    When Pertos Godelhausser climbed the stairs to the light-man's perch for the second performance of
the evening, Trimkin was waiting for him. The League President was dressed in the softest of brown,
imitation buckskin, with long fringe on the arms and around the hem of the jacket. He smiled and spread
his hands as the puppeteer displayed the handgun he had not had time to use the previous night.

    "I come unarmed," Trimkin said.
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    "And I should take advantage of that."

    "You'd never leave the theater alive, then"

    "Perhaps."

    "Most certainly."

     Then they stood there, facing each other, being men and playing the games of courage and
self-possession which are supposed to be those rituals which separate men from boys, though they
seemed more in the Neanderthal spirit than in the tradition of civilization.

    "So why are you here?" Pertos asked at last.

    "You even had an afternoon performance today." He pulled out one of the handbills that had been
circulated about the city. "And you have another scheduled every afternoon this week:"

    "Standard:"

    "Maybe you didn't understand, Mister Godelhausser."

    "I understood."

    "Then it's stubbornness."

    "No. It's just that I have a strong sense of self--preservation," Pertos said. "That's the sum of it." He
smiled, too warmly to mean it

    Trimkin looked nonplussed. "Self-preservation?"

     "Tonight, I'll sell my soul to a merchant, just as he predicted I would. The only thing I'll have left, then,
is pride and the future. Without money, I'll never see the stars, I'll die on Earth; there must be, then, many
per-formances in Springsun. For if I die on Earth, there is no future to look forward to. And without any
future, there can be no pride; a fly trapped in amber isn't proud. You understand?"

    Trimkin did not speak.

    "It's very difficult playing God," Pertos Said. "Maybe when you and your Heritage Leaguers have
established a little divinity for yourselves, you'll find that having the power of life and death over others is
not really worth the agony."

    "No one forced you to be a puppeteer"

   "No one forces the soldier to kill. He could throw down his gun and accept the stockade. But there's
something inside him somewhere that makes him like killing."

    "And you think I like power?"

    "Are fond of it"
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    "And the sin?"

    "One can either love power, or people. But the two do not mix."

    "And I suppose you love that idiot of yours. And those puppets which aren't even real."

    "No. I made the mistake of loving power, in a small way. I've been trying to reeducate myself, but
perhaps I'm too old."

    "Too old to suffer," Trimkin said, steering things back to more familiar ground. "We'll give you a final
chance. If your announcements are circulated tomorrow, if you still insist on performing then, your beating
will seem slight. We'd burn down the theater with you inside, if necessary."

    Pertos did not reply.

    Trimkin shrugged, then walked by the old man, thumped down the steps and was gone around the
corner, brown against white. The swish of his buckskin fringe whispered along the cold walls for long
seconds, then faded like a dream surrendering to consciousness.

    In the lightman's perch, Pertos locked the door behind himself and laid his pistol within easy reach.



    He sat behind the spotlight and swung the control con-sole to his side, looked at all the buttons and
toggles that controlled the stage, the curtain and the scenery which would rise out of the boards or
descend from the ceiling on wires whenever he gave the electronic command.

    He fingered the topmost row of toggles.        -

    Let there be light! he thought.

     He flipped the switches with quick fingers. The footlights popped on all across the stage, the dullest
of the white set, barely casting any illumination.

    Pertos laughed, though he was not at all happy.

    Let there be life ! he thought.

    The curtains opened, and the puppets frolicked forward. The last show of the night had begun,
playing to a capacity house. In the front row, in one of the most expensive seats, the devil sat biding his
time, disguised as a merchant named Alvon Rudi . . . .



     Pertos Godelhausser sat in a comfortable form-fitting chair that hugged the contours of his body,
holding the Holistian Pearl in his right hand, staring at nothing, his mouth somewhat slack and his face far
too pale. The jewel was a brilliant white that almost seemed to radiate heat, and as he rolled it back and
forth in his fingers it seemed to cling to his flesh with a will, like a magnet seeking out his bones through
the insulating cushion of his flesh.

Sebastian sat on the floor, lacquering a newly painted prop to keep the colors rich and vibrant as Pertos
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wanted them. He could never have been trusted to apply the many colors themselves, but he could work
the self-feeding lac-quer brush without much problem. It was something he usually looked forward to, for
it made him feel more a part of the show. He was always plagued with fear deep inside that he would one
day be useless and that Pertos would reject him for someone else. But tonight being useful was not
bringing him the sense of contentment and worth that it usually did.

He thought of Bitty Belina.

    Pertos had said that she was putting on a special show for the merchant Alvon Rudi. It was a new
show, a new story, privately enacted. And he and Pertos were to wait here, perhaps sleep here, in
Pertos' case, if the play should take an hour or all night. They were at the far end of the corridor from
Pertos' room where Rudi enjoyed the new play.

    He wished he could watch.

   Not being permitted to watch made him feel excluded. It was as if they all knew what the play was
about, except him. And that made him miserable. He felt childish and unneeded.

    Pertos slept. The Pearl glowed. And no one was watching the idiot at the moment.

    Sebastian knew from experience that the puppet master would be tranced for a long while yet. It had
only been moments since the strange sleep had taken him, and he never severed himself from a
Pearl-vision in less than an hour. Sometimes he stayed under for most of a day, not eating or drinking,
frightening Sebastian who thought he might be dead, though he never was.

    Sebastian put the lacquer brush down, and after the bristles had registered inactivity for twenty
seconds, the tool ceased to secrete its transparent, odoriferous shellac. On the paper laid down to
protect the floor, a wet circle seeped outwards from the bristles.

    It had come to him that tonight was the last night that Bitty Belina would be alive, at least for a while,
until they moved on to another town and her story could be enacted before fresh audiences. Two days of
any single story at a time was the limit. Then the puppets in that show would be returned to the Furnace
to call forth another batch. They died.

    He felt an indescribable panic seize him as he realized the full impact of what he had just been
thinking. He wanted to leap up and run and kick things and shout, work off this feeling of bursting apart.
But he knew that all of that would not keep the blond-haired puppet alive another minute. Did the rain
stop if you asked it to?

    Bitty Belina would die.

    Yet tonight she performed a new play, in private, and one longer than any in the puppet master's
catalogue. That hardly seemed fair when he was a part of the show. He should get to see the new story.

   She was in a new story. For the first time he understood the import of that concept. What had
happened to Bitty

Belina's prince? Was he in the new life she was living? And her three suitors? And the good angel? And
what of Wissa, the evil stepmother? Would Belina die in this new life rather than be saved for her prince,
by her prince, as she always had been before?
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    A new life? How was that possible? He, Sebastian, was the assistant. It could never happen that he
would wake up one morning as the puppet master with Pertos having taken his placel A person was what
he was, and nothing changed about that. You lived your life, over and over, and you accepted and
enjoyed it. Bitty Belina played out her story, was almost killed by the evil stepmother, was saved. Over
and over again. And he, Sebastian, moved from town to town with Pertos and unloaded the truck and
watched creation and waited behind the curtain before each per-formance and drank some wine and ate
and packed the truck and rode on with Pertos and unloaded the truck and watched creation . . . .

    You couldn't change your life!

    The prince wouldn't be there and the stepmother would succeed and she would die. Yet how could
she die when she had lived her life so often and always triumphed. How could she want to change her life
and maybe die?

    And would she be so dead . . . so dead that the Furnace would not be able to bring her back again?

    He was whimpering.

     He knew something was awfully wrong. The world seemed to have become unstable, the floor like
jelly, the walls shimmering and threatening to change shape and be something different.

    If she did not perform the script, her original life, the machine wouldn't revive her when she died. She
had never been meant to die outside of the Furnace. It was written that way. Just as he had not been
meant to be puppet master. Or a tree, for that matter. We are what we are. We aren't what we aren't.
And anyone who changes it, they die. They must die, or nothing would be solid and real any longer.
Belina with a sword through her neck, bubbling blood through her lips while the prince runs away with
Wissa . . .

   Belina with a knife in her belly, bleeding all over his hands and screaming and begging for help and
making him afraid.

    Blood, blood, blood on his hands, as before, once, then . . .

    He looked at his hands.

    No blood.

    He stood up and looked at Pertos.

    Pertos dreamed.

     Sebastian staggered from the room, his legs unexplainar bly weak, his shoulders aching, his arms
tired, as if he had dragged some burden across a long and rugged terrain. He was not certain what must
be done, but he was determined to do it to save Bitty Belina.

    Blood on his hands.

    Would they think he killed jenny, stabbed her, or would they believe his story?

    He stopped there in the middle of the long corridor behind the stage in the Grande Theater of
Springsun, wondering who Jenny was. He could not remember anyone by that name, although he did
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think of golden hair when he heard it. It scared him when he did not understand himself. It was as if
someone else had entered his head and was thinking for him, but their own memories were intruding and
he kept confusing them with things and places and people he knew.

    He heard puppet laughter.

    He started down the hall again.

   His head seemed to balloon, swell enormously, until it was larger than all the rest of him. He held his
hands to his ears, as if to keep himself from exploding.

    Perhaps it was a hundred years, perhaps a minute, before he reached the door of Pertos' room
where Bitty Belina was performing her new life, her dangerous new life. He stood outside, breathing hard
and wanting to charge inside and save her. But he didn't dare because of two quick memories that darted
through his clouded mind: First, Pertos had told him that Bitty Belina would be awkward in her new role
and wouldn't want Sebastian to see her until she had gotten it all down as well as she could; second, he
remem-bered the sharp, ugly way Belina had spoken to him the previous day, how she had laughed with
the others when he had had his "accident." But, too, he had laughed. And he couldn't be angry with
himself, could he?

    To counteract the memories that stalled him, he told himself that Pertos would thank him for keeping
Bitty Belina from harm. Pertos would say, "Why didn't I see the danger? Sebastian, you're a herol" And
even though Pertos had said there were no more heroes, Sebastian would be a hero. Too, it was easy to
convince himself that Bitty Be-lina's sharpness had not been disgust at all, but a sort of sympathy.

    He touched the door handle and found that it had not been locked.

    Puppets laughed.

    Belina laughed.

    Cautiously he slid the portal open until he could see most of the room. And it was then that the
balloon of his head exploded in all directions.

    Bitty Belina was naked, standing between the mammoth thighs of Alvon Rudi, caressing him there,
laughing as he laughed, the object of her attention every bit a third as large in length and diameter as she
was.

 Sebastian had only once ever seen a man with desire, and that once had traumatized him for life, had
scored into his brain like a lightning bolt scarring the trunk of a gnarled elm. His mother and father had left
their bedroom door open, and he had wandered in on some imagined quest or other, discovering them in
sex. He had thought that his father had been hurting her, had been stabbing her. He had leaped on the
bed, screaming, and flailing at his father with both small hands, biting, kicking. And even hours later,
when they had finally calmed him and his mother had assured him, again and again, that his father had not
been hurting her, he believed what he chose to believe. From then on, he had been ashamed that he
possessed the same flesh knife as his father. And the years since then, devoid of a single erection since
his sense of the sexual was all but nonexistent, had been a blessing. He knew that he could never ever
harm anybody, because there was no steel in his knife.

    And now, seeing Alvon Rudi, seeing Belina there touching the knife that could kill her, he was
plagued with visions of Belina dead, bloody, ruined. And over the visions, as if several pictures had been
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printed on one plate, he saw jenny with the knife in her gut, spouting blood. And for the first time he
understood, deep in himself where some-thing of the human mind survived, that the knife in jen-ny's gut
was his response to his father's penis in his moth-er. And he gagged and screamed and stumbled into the
room toward Alvon Rudi, attacking himself as well as the enemy.

    There were white faces.

    Puppets screamed.

    He felt Belina beating at his hands, then at his shins, as he knocked her to the floor.

    He remembered Rudi's face, purple and inhuman.

    He remembered bloodshot eyes watching him, terrified.

    He felt the prince's sword driven into the calf of his leg.

    He kicked, smashing the prince into the wall. The simu-lacrum's neck snapped, and it writhed a
moment before death was complete, blood running from its ears and nose, its face ashen and painfully
contorted, for it had never known the violent death it had so often dealt to Wissa.

    Alvon Rudi clawed at his face.

    He felt his cheeks running with blood.

    He laced his fingers tighter around the merchant's throat.

    The naked man convulsed, pitching to and fro on the bed, his lips almost blue now.

    "No! No! You stupid bastardl" Bitty Belina was screaming. She had climbed onto his back now and
was clawing her small hands at his clothes trying to reach his neck where she could swing an arm around
and go for his eyes.

    Alvon Rudi managed to drive a knee into Sebastian's crotch, making the brute gag and double over,
forcing him to break his deathlike grip.

    "Help!" Belina yelled.

   The golden-winged angel flew at Sebastian, tried for his eyes. But Sebastian batted the simulacrum
away with a large hand, sent it crashing against the front of the sutodoc where it broke its left wing and
tumbled to the floor, crying and cursing.

    Wissa stood in the doorway between rooms, wide-eyed and uncomprehending.

    Belina bit his neck, drew blood with her fine teeth.

     Alvon Rudi was trying to get off the bed, but his throat was heavily bruised, and he was dizzy from
the lack of blood to his brain. Slowly, he was gaining equilibrium, but too slowly. Much too slowly.

Sebastian reached for him, grabbed him again.
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   Rudi's hands locked on the idiot's fingers, trying -to pry them off his neck. He dug nails into
Sebastian's flesh.

    Belina gained the idiot's neck, reached round him, clawed at his left eye with her tiny fingers.

    Sebastian howled, shook her like a horse trying to throw a bronco buster. She fell, striking the floor
hard, and lay there whimpering, her hip crushed.

   Despite the fact that one eye was blurry with blood and tears, Sebastian continued to choke the
merchant, shaking the man with each furious pulsing squeeze of the fingers.

    He shook and squeezed for a long while after Alvon Rudi was dead, then turned and left that place,
walking in pure blackness, unknowing and uncertain, merely terrified and filled with a need to escape the
blood from the puppets . . . .



     Pertos Godelhausser had been awakened from his Pearl-visions by Wissa. She had been hysterical,
and she had had to repeat her hurried story several times before he had even an inkling of what had
transpired while he had been tranced. When he did discover that Alvon Rudi was dead, he was not angry
or frightened. Merely sad. It seemed like a logical tragedy to unroll in his life, the final act with no
denouement for the lead character, the hero.

    He picked up the dead prince and the wounded puppets, fed them to the furnace to be broken down
into synthetic flesh liquid. He collected the healthy puppets next and did the same with them. There were
no protests this time. They even seemed anxious to go.

     Back in his room he found a large blanket in a closet and wrapped Alvon Rudi's corpse and clothes
in that, tied the bundle around with four lengths of cord, as if it were nothing more than a rug. He had
found two thousand postals in the man's wallet, and he added that to the twenty-five thousand he had
gotten for renting Bitty Belina for the night. It never occurred to him to call the authori-ties, for that would
have caused had business in future cities, at least. It could very well lead to the suspension of his
entertainer's license, leaving him more stranded than ever, preyed on him in darkness and woke him ten
times between first sleep and dawn. But they were gone this time, not even evident in the distance of his
unconsciousness, not even lurking in the shadows. When he woke, it was more re-freshed and excited
than he had been in years, with a sense of the future that he had never before felt so strongly.

    He got up and sonic showered and dressed in clean clothes.

   He ate quite well, though he punched for random foods through the delivery system and ate a
somewhat hodge-podge breakfast. Even if he had been able to identify the words on the menu he would
have preferred this mixed-up meal of sweets and meats and cereals and liquors.

    By the time he left his room he was feeling very well indeed. He hurried down the corridor to find out
what Pertos might want of him this morning. It was a day when he felt sure he could accomplish a great
deal. He wanted to prove himself.

    The door to Pertos' room was open.

    He went inside.
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    Pertos was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, one side of his head slewed crooked. His light
yellow shirt was sodden with blood, and there was a fragment of bone lying next to his right ear.

    And then it all came back to Sebastian, and be left that room and vomited in the hallway at the
disgust he felt at what he had done.



     He had been all over the theater, looking into all of the rooms, touching everything he saw, though he
did not know what it was that he was after. In time, it became dear to him that he felt better in those
rooms where the old puppet master had been. He spent a long time in the lightman's perch, tracing his
blunt fingers over the grips of the spot-light, around and around the buttons and the knob-headed toggles
of the console that controlled the stage effects. He stood a full hour on the stairs leading from the perch
that Pertos had trod before and after each performance. It was almost as if he could feel the places the
old man's shoes had worn in the concrete. Once, he fancied he felt the vibrations of other feet on those
stairs, though there was no one else about, and that thought suddenly terrified him so much that he ran
from that dark, back area to the stage where he sat by the footlights he had turned on, trying to imagine
there was an audience this morning. But when he forced a shimmering vision of people, they were all
Pertos Godel-hausser, and he had to run again, crying and frightened.

    He spent a while with the newly painted props that he had been lacquering the night before, hunting
Pertos' emanations on them, the sign that the puppeteer had been here, had worked here, had lived.

    Then he went back to be certain Pertos was dead, for it had occurred to him that Pertos had never
died before, that his life story didn't permit death. Had Pertos been living another story, then, too?

    Pertos was dead. Blood. Bone. Staring eyes.

    He carried the corpse to the Furnace and attempted to feed it inside, with the notion that he could
then have Pertos re-created. All. he would have to do was read the nobs, learn to use the knobs. And
find out which of the identity wafers would reproduce Pertos. But the Furnace refused to accept the
human meat.

    Sebastian spilled all the identity wafers out and looked for something he might recognize as Pertos'
name. He had no luck. Then he thought he could look for his own identity wafer, and maybe there would
be something about it that would help him find Pertos. Only he and Pertos were big, while Bitty Belina
and the others were small. That might mean that he and Pertos had different identity discs. He looked
through the wafers four times before he was willing to admit that there was no disc for him. And probably
none for Pertos either.

    And then he felt sadder than ever.

    Just before noon, while Sebastian was outside examining the truck, feeling for the past and finding
mostly cold vinyl and icy metal, Trimkin came with two men. They were a different pair, though Sebastian
could not be expected to notice that Trimkin seemed always to be accompanied by different men each
time, all of them bland.

    "Is your master about?" Trimkin asked the idiot.

Sebastian almost said yes, the master is inside, before he realized that no one should ever see Petros
now. If anyone saw what he had done to Pertos, they would lock him away, like they would have done
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over jenny, and then he would be dead himself, chained up in darkness.

   "Lose your tongue?" Trimkin asked, smiling. He seemed a pleasant man. Pertos, however, could
have told Sebastian that Trimkin had seemed pleasant even while he had super-vised the beating his men
had dealt the puppet master.

    "No," Sebastian said.

    It was not a cold day really, but he was freezing. He wanted to go back into the theater, but he didn't
dare lead them there.

    "No what? No, your master isn't about? Or, no, you still have your tongue?"

Sebastian looked around the cab of the truck where he was sitting, back through the open door at
Trimkin.

    "I guess he's inside," Trimkin said.

    "No!" The idiot gasped as the men turned to walk toward the theater.

    "No?"

    "No."

    "Where then, boy? You wouldn't lie to us, would you?"

    Sebastian shook his head.

    "That's good. Now, if he truly isn't in the theater, where is he?"

    Sebastian could not think of anything to say, and for the thousandth time in his life, he damned his
slow-wittedness.

    "We don't want to harm him," Trimkin said. "We just came to tell him that he might want to come out
here, in back, and watch his truck burn."

    For the first time, Sebastian saw the hand torch and the cans of liquid in the hands of the men with
Trimkin.

    "Inside I guess," Trimkin said, turning.

    "Leaving!" Sebastian gasped. "Going away!"

    Trimkin turned again, slowly, smiling broadly. "You wouldn't kid me about that, would you, son?" He
laughed, as if anticipating the joke, though there was a great deal in that laughter that was not humorous.

    "Leaving," Sebastian said.

    Trimkin considered that. "There weren't any handbills about the new play tonight," he said, speaking
to himself as much as to the brute in the truck. "So old Godelhausser has gotten some sense, eh?"
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    "Some," Sebastian agreed.

     Trimkin exploded with genuine laughter then, and the men with him joined in. His face grew red, and
his thin body seemed to tremble all over, as if he had a disease of some sort.

Sebastian smiled nervously.

    Trimkin placed a hand on Sebastian's knee. "You tell your master that we congratulate his good
sense"

Sebastian nodded.

    Talking animatedly about their triumph, the Heritage Leaguers turned and left the back wing of the
plaza. where the truck was parked, entered the white immaculate silent city that was their dead world.
Sebastian watched them go, listened until there was no echo of excitement and laughter. Then he slid out
of the truck, slammed the door shut and ran inside. He saw now that he must dispose of the corpse or
face discovery when Trimkin returned the next day, angry that he had been lied to.

     First, he took out the sections of the Furnace, which he knew how to dismantle, having done that so
often in these last five years. He packed them in their niches in the cargo hold of the truck, and the
shape-changing contour pads slithered around them in warm, live embrace. Next, he removed all the
props and then all their personal belongings from the rooms. He went over each chamber again and
again, to make certain everything had been taken. He noticed the rug last, and he was not certain that it
belonged to Pertos. Then he found it was not a rug, but a blanket rolled about something. He broke the
twine and unwrapped the bloated, blackened body of Alvon Rudi, and it was only then that he
remembered the night in full and realized that he would have to dispose of two corpses if he were to keep
out of the grasp of the authorities and out of the small rooms where they would put him for the rest of his
life, the small rooms his uncle had always drunkenly referred to in long, terrifying tales when he had been
sadistically trying to get a rise out of young Sebastian.

    There seemed to be nowhere in the theater to hide the corpses until he went, reluctantly, into the
basement. He took the wide steps carefully, his heart beating abnormally fast. The ceiling lights had
burned out in most of the grids above, leaving three quarters of the way in shadow, some of it brown,
some purple, some pure pitch in hue. Though the

 theater had been used in its two hundred and fifty years, it had not been frequented more than three or
four weeks a year, and the cellar had not been maintained in the splen-dor lavished upon the upper
regions.

    Once, he came to a place where the way was blocked almost entirely by a wispy spider web, and he
quaked at going on. There were two spiders in the strings, shuffling quickly back and forth, as if sizing
him up as possible prey, each as large as his thumb. Here and there, lumps of white silk bristled with the
thrusting limbs and wings of dead insects encased by the spiders against the sparseness of winter.

    He tried reaching out and touching the web, but drew back instantly as he felt the somewhat sticky,
humming fibers. It was almost as if he had felt Pertos in that web, as he had felt him other places. But he
no longer wished to seek out the puppet master's emanations.

    That was over.

    He went back up the stairs to the theater, found a length of wood in the prop room and came back,
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shredding the web ahead of himself.

    He stomped one of the spiders. It made a wet mess on the concrete.

    He looked for the other.

    It skittered along the edge of the steps, dropped over the side and was gone.

    He felt a desperate need , to know where that spider was, but when he reached the end of the steps
and ran along the side of them to look for it, it had escaped.

   Now he wanted to return more than ever. And perhaps he would have if he had not heard the
gushing roar farther back in the semi-dark rooms of the basement. It sounded like a river.

    Jenny . ..

    He followed the noise of the water until he found the large, round drainage pit in the floor. It was
sunken a foot below the floor level, and there was a heavy metal hatch that fit into that depression. He
wrestled the hatch open and looked down. The dim light was just enough to give him a view of swiftly
moving water four feet below, black water that now and then held a whirling cluster of paper, leaves or
wood. There was the smell of human wastes, and he understood that this must serve as the sewer for the
city, emptying its burdens in some underground repository or in the sea.

    jenny ..

   He could dump both corpses into the sewer, and they would never be found. Or, if they were, he
would be gone for a long time and no one would know where to look for him to put him in the little
rooms where they tortured people like him.

 He turned to go back upstairs, to bring the corpses down, when he saw the thing in the middle of the
floor a dozen feet away, and all his strength went out of him like water draining out through the open
faucet in a barrel.

    The spider.

    It poised on six legs, two legs waving in the air, as if pointing at him.

    The strange light caused it to form a shadow almost a foot in length.

    He screamed.

    The spider moved toward him.

   He could not move. It felt as if every bone in his body had fused itself to the next bone, as if every
muscle had ceased to exhibit effect upon his skeleton.

    The spider danced closer.

    He thought he could hear its hairy legs brushing along the concrete, and he ground his teeth and cried
and whimpered and begged it to go away.
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    And when it was inches from him, it veered and skittered into the darkness, leaving him exhausted
and drenched with perspiration.

    "Pertos . . . Jenny . . . please," he said.

    And when the spider did not come back for twenty minutes, he felt his strength returning and knew
he could go on with it.

     He tilted the blanket containing the clothes and corpse of the merchant, Alvon Rudi, into the hole. It
pulled free of his hands and fell into the black water, unwrapping some-what so that just as it sank down
the rigor-mortised bare arm of the man slipped through, the fingers curled as if grasping toward the edge
of the drain to save itself. Then it bobbed to the surface, was caught in the current and swept into the
tunnel, out of sight.

    Sebastian lifted Pertos' body, hesitated, then shoved it after the first corpse.

   And as he watched it go, time seemed to slow, to run like syrup, so that he had time to watch two
events at the same time, one of the past, the other of the present:

    Jenny hanging on the edge of the rocky cliff, head-down toward the large, smooth boulders and the
surging white of the river;

    Pertos sliding gently, gently toward the boiling blackness of the sewer, toward the litter and the
defecation;

    Jenny gone, sliding like an arrow at first, then turning, tumbling, over and over as if she were doing
acrobatics;

    Pertos twisting slightly;

    Jenny striking the water, catching her head against a boulder, bursting and rushing away;

    Pertos splashing into the sewer, spraying water over the idiot, sinking and rising and whirling away
forever;

    Silence;

    Silence . . .

    He closed the hatch on the drain because he was afraid of the two corpses trying to crawl out again.
That was why he had brought them both down before throwing either one in. He would not have wanted
to come back with the second body to discover that the first had worked its way from its watery grave
and was perched upon the lip of the hole, drying itself.

    He left the basement.

   Twice as he went up the stairs he was certain he could hear the brushing noise of the spider's legs
upon the con-crete. But every time he turned abruptly, trying to catch sight of it, there was nothing to see.

    But that didn't mean, he knew, that there was nothing there.
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 Before he left, he made a last inspection of the rooms and found the Holistian Pearl, which he placed in
his pocket. For a moment he considered taking it down to the basement and tossing it into the waters
after Pertos' corpse, but he was certain if he went down there he would never come upstairs again and he
gave up that idea.

     He waited until night to leave Springsun, for he didn't want anyone to notice that it was only the
assistant in the cab of the truck and that the puppet master himself was not in evidence. He did not know
what anyone might make of that, but he was certain they would be suspicious. Too, he knew how badly
he had handled the great air-cushion truck in the past. Pertos had called him a "demon" behind the
wheel, and he had almost wrecked twice in the space of a single block. Perhaps he would wreck tonight,
and then it would all be finished and he would be dead or they would catch him. But he couldn't allow
that fear to keep him from leaving. If he stayed, there was a far greater terror: that of the rooms where
they supposedly tortured young boys who were stupid-and that was one fear that he could not bear at
all.

    He started the vehicle easy enough, and as the engine whuffed and the huge blades began beating, the
other steps of the driver's procedure came back to him, bits and pieces of memories from all the hours he
had watched Pertos at this task.

 He held the craft down until the blades beat steadily, then released the clutch. The truck rose two feet
above the pavement, shuddering with power, waiting for the signal to progress.

    His mouth was very dry.

    He sent the truck forward too fast. In the last rushing seconds before impact with the pink wall of the
opera house, he managed to bring the wheel tight around. The side of the truck brushed the opera house
with its slip-stream but didn't sustain any damage of direct contact. But before he could feel excitement
over this initial triumph, there was a towering elm looming directly ahead of him, and he was forced to
tear the wheel around the opposite direction, hard, his fingers slicked with sweat. The truck brushed the
side of the tree. Metal protested noisily, but nothing tore loose. Autumn leaves sprinkled down across the
windscreen, stuck to the glass so that he had to squint between them. He went on.

 He soon learned to hit the acceleration pedal with the utmost care, though he now and then forgot and
came within inches of killing himself by ramming buildings and, occasionally, other vehicles.

    For a long while, he wandered the streets, searching for some way out of the city. He passed the
signs for the superhighway many times but could not read them.

    On a backstreet where a park sided the road, he lost control and destroyed six saplings before
stopping and cautiously working back toward the pavement.

   The city seemed mostly deserted. It was this lack of witnesses which kept him from being
apprehended and detained by the police. His vehicle moved quietly, and after any small collision, he was
soon gone, whispering down an alleyway in search of exit.

    In the morning, it would appear to some that a gremlin had been about wreaking havoc on those who
had somehow engaged its anger.

      In time, he found a ramp and took it. The truck left the city for the wide, featureless plains of the
little-used super-highways which he and Pertos had traveled so much in these last five years. The sight of
that uniform gray without the sharp clutter of buildings on either side was almost a religious experience.
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He turned right, tramped the accelera-tor. The truck swept down the road, whined under the widely
spaced arclights. Ten miles later, the city limits passed and there was no illumination but what the
head-lamps provided.

    He didn't get sleepy, for a change. He could not remem= ber another night when he had not been
sleepy earlier in the evening. There was that ballooning excitement in him now, and it crowded out his
exhaustion.

    The wind picked up eventually, and lightning snapped along the undersides of the clouds.

    "Tell me about . . . 'bout them," he said.

    He waited.

    Only the thunder answered.

    "About stars," he explained.

    He could only see two or three stars through the blanket of the storm clouds. They were lovely.

    "Stars?" he repeated.

    When he received no answer, he turned to look at Pertos. It all came back again, and he almost lost
control of the truck.

    He didn't speak again. Or look to his right as he drove.

    Sometime toward morning, when the first light broke along the horizon and sent glassy, bright fingers
higher into the sky, piercing the balloons of the clouds, he realized that he had no idea where he was
going. This depressed him, perhaps more than it should have, for early morning on an empty highway can
be a miserably lonely time.

    It was raining now. His wipers thumped rhythmically back and forth, sloshing the water into the
drain-channels below the glass.

    He listened to the drumming pellets of water beating furiously on the roof of the cab.

    He didn't know where he was going, might as well face that. Worse yet, he did not know of any
place he could go. He tried to think of the names of other cities, but his mind refused to spit up that
information. He thought of pulling over at one of the regularly spaced rest stops to allow himself to think
things through, but panic took him every time he considered such a thing. Somehow, he was certain that,
once he had stopped, he would never start again. And so he drove, the rotars beating steadily beneath
him, their noise consolation of a sort.

    He had changed his story, he realized. He was not living the same life that he had always lived before.
He had gone against the script. And it became painfully evident as the scenery flashed by in a
monotonous gray-green monocolor, that he was not a puppet master, not capable of taking Pertos'
place.

    What then?
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    He was very much afraid. And he was somehow certain that the spider had found its way out of the
cellar and onto the truck-and that he was carrying the spider with him and that it was spinning its web
somewhere nearby and that it was waiting, waiting . . . .




October and November



    It was a beautiful land, restored to what it had been centuries ago, clean and untainted. The pines
were tall and sturdy, and the floor of the earth beneath them was car-peted with brown needles. Because
of the dense shadow they threw, there was not much that grew beneath them. All day, the sky seemed
like a roof over the earth, low and blue, almost within reach; at night, there were more stars than
Sebastian had ever seen in his life. They dazzled him, and they held him for hours, his neck growing stiff
as he watched them, until he nodded and fell easily into untrou-bled sleep.

    Sometimes Noname would wake him shortly after and urge him to bed, much as Pertos might have
done. Other times Noname would be there in the morning, sitting at the idiot's feet, watching him, silent,
admonitory in his expres-sions, waiting for the day to begin. Sebastian would focus on the too-large head
of the creature, on the eyes skewed out of their proper position, and for a long while he would have no
idea where the thing had come from. Slowly, though, he would remember. He called the creature
Noname because he had not known what to call it, since he could not read the identity wafers, and since
it was not really what it was supposed to be anyway.

   Sometimes they would have breakfast, sometimes not. Noname seemed as cavalier about the
necessities of life as Sebastian, though his attitude was not engendered by a low intelligence. Apathy
came, instead, from being uncertain of life, from being a mistake, from being without a concrete identity
and a past and future.

     The truck was parked in a copse of trees two hundred yards from the highway. The rolling land and
the thrusting masses of pines protected it from observation by anyone but old Ben Samuels who lived in a
cabin two thousand feet farther back in the woods. Perhaps such an isolated position was not necessary,
for there had been no police cars on the road for the entire journey northwest from Springsun. There had
been no search aircraft, and the radio in the truck had never mentioned the disappearance of Alvon Rudi,
so far as the idiot could remember.. Still, he felt better sheltered from sight by trees and by the land, and
he remained. He did not particularly intend to remain here forever, but neither did he make plans to leave
within the foreseeable future. It was as if this pocket of Canadian wilderness was a bubble in which time
did not progress even though those wrapped in it lived and aged.

    During the course of the day, they might wander into the trees, away from the cabin and from the
truck, examining moss and ferns, looking for fossils in rocks, which Sebastian could find but could not
explain. They might take up post on a log or a flat rock, there to wait the coming of the animals and birds.
Sebastian was able to remain perfectly still for quite a long while, as if he had become a rooted piece of
flora struggling for life in the woods. Noname, on the other hand, was always fidgeting, scaring off the
animals when they ventured too close. His hands shook a great deal, and he coughed nervously, as if he
were embarrassed of something.

    Sebastian was displeased, but he enjoyed Noname's com-pany too much to make him stay behind
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when it came time for a walk in the forest.

     Several times a week they walked to Ben Samuels, cabin to sit with him. The place was constructed
of hand-cut, dressed logs, the ends notched to fit snugly, then slimed with resin and bound together with
strips of bark and plastic cord (one of Samuels' few concessions to civiliza-tion). The house had a rugged
facade, though the inside boasted a few pleasures one nught not expect in a hand-hewn dwelling, and
more than a bit of refinement and quality which seemed at odds with the rural tone of every-thing else.
For instance, Samuels had spent many long evenings sanding and polishing the interior walls of his home
until the rounded humps of the logs gleamed with a rich, stained, waxed color and the grain of the wood
was presented in an almost three-dimensional effect that made Sebastian feel he could delve fingers into
the core of the logs.

     Ben Samuels was a match for the house. He was quite an old man, in his late seventies, though
occasional trips to civilization and the rejuvenation treatments taken there had kept him healthy and
relatively unwanted. His arms were still well-muscled, his legs quick, his chest unsunken. His face was
sharply angled, filled with wrinkles, though he said he had had those since he was a young man in the
woods and that he would not let the doctors remove them on his annual visits to the city. His hands were
large, gnarled, scarred with the many wounds of a lifetime as a woodsman. In sum, he appeared to be
hacked from the same pine as his home.

    And like his cabin, he was more inside than he appeared to be from out. He was a quiet man who
read a lot. His avoidance of people was not engendered by a dislike of men, but by a sadness at
watching what men did to each other in the course of their lives. Though he wondered about Sebastian
having a truck of his own, he never asked questions about that, for he was sure that a story of human
suffering lay behind it, and he did not want to hear what they had done to the idiot to make him run away.
Those were the stories he had left the cities to forget.

     Most often, Ben Samuels would be on his porch when they came, and they would sit down on the
wide expanse of steps beside him, watching him whittle. Or he might have his pad and pencils again,
sketching. He was good at rendering realistically. Sebastian never ceased to be amazed at the accuracy
of the scene transformed to paper. It seemed to the idiot that there must be some mechanism within
Samuels' hand which resorted to a memory tape of the scene to be drawn when the old man told it to,
making the lines in a ,carefully pre-planned pattern. Sebastian gen-erally accepted the existence of
computers and memory tapes. He had never been able to understand men, however.

    "Slept late again," Samuels would say.

    Sebastian would nod. It was the old man's only admoni-tion, for he was certain a man wasted if he
didn't go to bed and rise early and labor while awake.

    "The forest didn't get so big by sleeping."

    "Or the stars," Sebastian would say.

    Samuels would turn and look at him oddly, as if he were staring at a different person than he had
thought a moment ago. "True enough."

    "How is it with you?" Samuels would ask Noname.

    "Cold this morning," the small creature replied.
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     "Cold? This? Just you wait for winter! It comes early up here, and it stays late. And then we'll see if
those heating coils in the truck will keep you warm! Never trust to manufacture when you can build more
reliably yourself."

    The reason Samuels wanted Sebastian to sleep early and rise early was so that the daylight hours
could be put to the purpose of constructing a permanent home to see them through the winter. But the
winter was an eternity away as far as Sebastian was concerned. Tomorrow was the future, or perhaps
only this afternoon. After an inspection of the truck and the way the rear had been converted into a
semblance of a home, the old man decided the heating coils would probably keep the idiot and the
puppet warmer than the cabin kept him. He had ceased to be so adamant about the necessity for a cabin,
but he still mentioned it whenever he could.

     Now, when Sebastian did not respond, he launched into a story about the deepest snow he had seen
in all the years he had lived here, and both the idiot and the puppet grinned and settled down to listen.
Ben Samuels told fine stories, even if all parts of them weren't told on a level you could understand.

     Toward evening, if they did not stay to eat with Sam-uels, Sebastian and Noname would return to
the truck, where the idiot would switch on the single light against the growing darkness. Every time, as the
yellow glow appeared, he would remember that without the old woodsman they would have no light or
heat. Very likely, they would have been apprehended by now, or died of exposure. Samuels had found
them a mile down the highway from here, the battery dead. Sebastian knew nothing of that, and had sat
stubbornly in the driver's seat some four hours before the old man found them, waiting for the truck to
want to start again. Samuels had charged them from his own Rover and led them back to the trees and
his cabin. Now he charged the battery every four or five days, whenever it got low again.

    Every time he turned on the light, the idiot repeated to himself the importance of charging the battery.
If he ever left this place, he would have to learn that an electric vehicle must be filled with electricity at
regular intervals, even when its batteries are, as Samuels said, the best man had ever devised.

    There, at night, with the single overhead light, he would go to work with the Furnace. Weeks earlier,
parked in another forest a couple of hundred miles away from here, he had puzzled out the way the wafer
was put into the machine, and he had started creating. But because the use of the two knobs confused
him, the results had been dis-tressing. The puppets had been deformed, monsters with melted faces and
without eyes, with legs that seemed to have no bones, with arms that did not end in hands, but lumps of
protoplasm instead. The only halfway decent result was Noname, but even he was disfigured. And
despite the fact he had been formed with an identity wafer, he did not know who he was or remember
any of his past periods of consciousness as should have been imprinted on the wafer. Sebastian had
worked diligently after Noname, but the puppet had not signaled that the idiot was on the correct course.
He had been an accident, and the puppets made after him seemed more grotesque and horrid than those
which had come before. The idiot closed down the Furnace, angry and confused. He kept Noname out
of the flesh bank to provide company, and together they drove north, without purpose.

    Then the dead battery.

    Then Ben Samuels.

    And now, for three weeks, the woods and the long nights, the listening to stories and watching the
old man draw. But Sebastian was restless.

   He hungered for company, for the special companionship he had known with Pertos in the old days.
Noname, of
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 course, was company of sorts, though not the kind he sought. Noname was too much like himself to
really com-pliment his personality: floundering, lost, seeking signposts of one sort or another. Samuels did
not provide what he required, for the old man was careful not to meddle, careful not to make his
suggestions into commands. He could not know that, in fact, part of what the idiot required eras
commanding. The world seemed increasingly unreliable and fluid, and he longed for someone like Pertos
to tell him what to do with his time.

    For some reason, Bitty Belina was on his mind constant-ly. She represented a touch with the old
script, the life he had stopped leading. If he could only resurrect her, all would be well. He was sure of
that. He had forgotten the way in which she had spoken to him, the way -she had laughed with the
others, the way she had pleaded with him to kill Pertos.

    She was a pretty puppet.

    He remembered that he liked her laugh.

    And her smile.

    And her yellow hair.

    If Bitty Belina could be returned to him, whole and safe, then all would be well. And perhaps, if she
was here with him, he would stop having nightmares about a blond girl named jenny with a knife in her
belly . . . If there was a panacea for all bad memories, it was Belina.

    Near the end of October, he put the pieces of the Fur-nace together once again, in the rear of the
truck. He had forgotten how to tap the vehicle's battery, but he required only a little while to relearn the
technique. He rolled back the Olmescian amoeba until it clung to the rear of the machine, quivering
gently, out of his way. Cautiously, he set about the clumsy work of learning godhood.

    Noname watched.

    This time, the deformed puppet took more of an interest in creation than he had before. In the
intervening weeks, he had had an opportunity to come to know Sebastian, and he no longer feared his
master as he had at first. He stood on the casing of the Furnace, near the faceplate that gave view of the
capsule-womb, waiting for a miracle.

 Sebastian shuffled the identity wafers, pausing to study the printing on the smooth side of each, as if
some single word would pop up and stand above the incomprehensible pattern of the others: Belina. But
when he had gone through all of them, he still had no idea which was hers. Two hundred and fifty
puppets waited, and the chances were he would resurrect the evil stepmother, Wissa, before he called
Belina to life. And he didn't want to do that, although he knew he could feed her into the Furnace again
and be rid of her if she did show up before the heroine.

    "What are you looking for?" Noname asked after all the discs had been passed over.

   Sebastian watched the twisted face staring up at him, and he was charged with a mixture of pity and
anger.

    "Is there one particular puppet?" Noname asked.
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    "Bitty Belina," the idiot said at last.

    The puppet picked up one of the discs. It was only as large as the idiot's hand, but in the small
creature's fingers, it seemed like a tire from Samuels' Rover. Noname skimmed the printed material on
the back and found the name of the puppet represented by the plastic wafer and the carefully etched
memory circuits on the roughened side. He tossed it down and reached for another.

    "You can ... find?" Sebastian asked, feeling the old excitement rise in him after all this time.

    "Sure," Noname said. "Give me a couple of minutes."

    It took ten minutes. He handed a wafer to Sebastian which looked exactly like all the others. "Her?"

    "Her"

    His fingers trembled, and he could not think what to do. Holding the identity wafer, he was holding
Bitty Belina. He could almost feel the warmth of her flesh, the tremble of her pulse, the brushing coolness
of her long, yellow hair. And yet this was plastic, flat and round and stupid.

    Maybe it wasn't too late at all. Maybe the old life could be recalled and everything would be as
before. If Bitty Belina was inside this wafer of plastic, then she couldn't have changed. She could still go
back to living her old story, her old life, where her stepmother was killed by the prince and where she
lived happily every after.

    Then he remembered the flesh in the Furnace and knew better. The identity wafer might not be
subject to change, but the flesh could be twisted and corrupted.

    He felt terrible.

    "Are you going to make her?" Noname asked.

    Sebastian looked up, not comprehending, his eyes duller than usual, his lips slack.

    "Are you going to revive her?"

    After a time, he managed to say, "Yes."

    Holding her plastic personality, he thought of the blue light that was focused on her when she stood in
center stage. He thought of her hair gleaming with vitality, the audience held spellbound by her beauty. He
did not think, even once, of the way she had stood naked between Alvon Rudi's thighs or the way she
had clawed at his eyes and had bitten his neck when he came to her aid.

    He slid the wafer into the Furnace and listened to the first sounds of creation stirring deep in the metal
bowels. There was a prolonged grumbling noise, then the clatter of computers talking to themselves, the
whine of memory tapes activated, called up from storage. The capsule-womb filled with synthetic flesh,
formless now but soon to be occupied. There was a distant hissing noise, a click, then silence again. It
was much like a pinball machine lighting up after accepting its dime, then waiting for the first silver bearing
to be turned loose.

    "Is that all?" Noname asked. He walked to the edge of the thick viewplate, his toes on the glass,
looked down at the unformed jelly. "Is that all it's going to do about Bitty Belina? That blob of stuff?"
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    The light was green.

     Sebastian touched the knobs carefully and began to ex-periment with them. They slid easily in either
direction, as far as he wished to turn them. It was curiously com-fortable sensation to hold those soft,
rounded instruments cupped in the palms of his hands, as if they were more than extensions of a machine,
as if they offered him an intimacy with some personality which had no identity wafer but was every bit as
real as the puppets.

    The light became amber.

    "There's something happening now," Noname said, point-ing.

    The synthetic flesh curled and sought a form. But there was something about the agonizing struggle
beyond the glass which bespoke sickness. It was more like a cancerous tumor burgeoning larger and
larger than a healthy puppet coming to life. It squirmed and flushed with the colors of rot.

    "Soon," Noname said.

    But the amber was all wrong, and the idiot switched the knobs back and forth, both clockwise, both
counterclock-wise, now each opposed to the other in the direction of its turn. There should be crimson
next, he knew, and finally the brilliantly pure white of a successful creation. As he sought those hues, his
hands became more and more frantic with the knobs, and panic slowly replaced caution.

    "An arm!" Noname reported, as if all were going perfect-ly well and Bitty Belina would be with them
in short order.

   But the arm was much too long, all out of proportion, with four knuckles in every finger, the fingers
themselves deformed and twisted in a useless tangle.

    The amber blended with yellow into fierce brightness.

    The yellow became orange.

     This new development made Sebastian feel better, for the orange was closer to red than anything he
had thus far produced. But the deformed hand remained there all the same, and the other arm looked
even worse. It was too short where the first had been too long. The fingers were intact, but the elbow
joint was swollen with useless carti-lage and unfunctioning bones. It curved in against the jelling body, as
if the puppet were clutching its stomach in pain.

    "A face," Noname Said.

    It was a girl's face.

    It was her face.

    "Hair," Noname said.

    Yellow hair crinkled below her smooth stomach, on the top of her bald head, curling down to her
bare shoulders, tickling her pert breasts. He noticed one breast was set too far to the side.
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    "No," he said, very quietly, very softly. A disgust rose in him, possessed him, and he wanted to break
things.

    "Almost finished," Noname said. He did not hike the looks of what he saw, and he stepped back
from the glass.

    "Bitty-" Sebastian said.

   As if that were a cue, she opened her eyes. She never should have been able to do that while in the
womb, but she did. There was no eyeball in her left socket. The other blue gem watched him without
expression.

    "No," he said, speaking more loudly now.

    She tried to get up from the forming tray, levering with her good elbow and her tiny feet. Still behind
the glass, she seemed more like a part of a film than something real. She was still watching him in that
way that told him nothing.

    "Stay," he said.

    She chattered. It seemed senseless.

   She managed to stand, and her face was pressed tight against the viewplate, directly beneath him.
She tried to

speak, but the words were not clear, even if they did contain some meaning.

    He turned and ran from the truck, into the darkness, gagging and sputtering, unable to get a clean
breath. In the woods, lying on wet, dead grass, he began to weep.

     He watched Ben Samuels whittle and sketch. He spent long hours sitting quietly in the woods, waiting
for the squirrels who were engaged in a last flurry of activity before winter set in. He watched the sky be
blue and sometimes sat in the rain, feeling it. Nearly a week passed before he could bring himself to
return to the Furnace and begin his experi-ments again. Even then, there was a horror waiting just below
the surface of his mind, ready to possess him at the slightest opportunity.

    He decided against using Bitty Belina's identity wafer until he had the process conquered. When he
could bring her back in her full beauty, then it would be safe to use her disc.

    "Which do you want to use?" Noname asked, sitting by the stacks of identity wafers.

     Sebastian thought for a long while. He could remember only a few of the puppets' names. One other
that stuck in his mind quite as strongly as Bitty Belina was a grotesque little monster named Wolf, the
villain of a horror story that was quite popular everywhere it was performed. He would not mind
experimenting with Wolf, for if Wolf turned out deformed it was only just punishment for him.

    "Wolf," he told Noname.

    "Wolf what?"

    "Just Wolf."
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    Noname found it shortly. He handed it to Sebastian who took it with some reluctance. If he had felt
the sensuous-ness, the warmth and delicacy of Bitty Belina when he had held her wafer, what would he
feel while handling this one? Death and blood and ruthlessness? He took it at last but was surprised to
discover he felt nothing at all. Just cool plastic, smooth on one side and rough on the other.

   Wolf was born with holes in his leathery wings, with no teeth where fangs should have been; he was
consigned to liquification and the idiot made another try, knowing full well that evil must have undamaged
wings and teeth with which to bite.

   Wolf was born without a face, and he was liquified and the idiot made another try, realizing that evil
must have eyes in order to find its victims and persuade them.

   Wolf was born with more teeth than he should have had, the fangs as long as his fingers. His claws
were sharp and like the blades of knives, and his face spoke of rot and decay, so hideous was its
composition. And the idiot fed him back into the Furnace after much consideration, aware that evil must
never be so utterly vile that there seems no way against it.



    Wolf was born.

    And he died.

    He had no sins.



    In time, Sebastian found how the controls were meant to be operated: the right knob to control the
intensity of the color beyond the glass, the left to move that color through the spectrum. This was, at
least, the outward manifestation of them, though they surely performed more complicated tasks within the
bowels of the Furnace. The idiot cared only for appearances, however, and he was happy. Four times,
without fail, he formed Wolf complete, just as he was meant to be to play his role. Sebastian had
conquered the details of creation, and the catalogue of puppet identities was open to him.

 Sebastian's good humor reached a peak with his fourth full success at creating the villainous Wolf, and it
was a giddiness that arose from this good humor that led to his worst mistake since Springsun. He placed
the unconscious Wolf in one of the shallow nutrient trays to help bring him around. The black wings
glistened wetly, fluttered now and then as Wolf's body came slowly to full life. Sebastian wanted to see if
the small beast could walk and talk and was otherwise in possession of its own faculties as it had been
after the previous three creations. Impatient for the puppet to come awake, he went to pour wine for
himself and for Noname, a small celebration, the first he had allowed himself since Springsun. He left
Wolf unwatched.

     Whenever a puppet is created in a Vonopoen Furnace, the identity disc is retained within the machine
until such a time as the same puppet is returned to its component synthetic flesh liquid. When the puppet
is fed into storage, all of its new experiences are first transferred to the wafer. In this manner, a puppet is
able to have a continuing life, though that life may be broken into one- and two-day lengths over a period
of a great many years. This was thought to be a wise consideration by the Vonopoen ar-tisans, for a
puppet who is permitted to have some exis-tence of its own will be more easily controlled than one who
feels that he is being used to perform and cast aside like a prop afterwards. Too, to earn the reward of a
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private night or two, after their performances, the puppets will work harder on stage, perform to their
best abilities.

    The puppets are actually tiny humans, the Vonopoens warn all those who come to learn about
puppeteering. And those who refuse to see them as such are inviting financial failure-and perhaps
personal harm.

    Wolf s identity wafer had recorded the long string of bad creations that he had undergone. Scored
into his mind were the recollections of the painful distortions he had been born into while Sebastian was
learning the use of the machine, the details so vivid as to make his nerves scream again and his muscles
twitch and convulse in horror. Too, he remem-bered the three good creations before this one, and the
quick return to the Furnace every time. The first memory frightened him, even though he was supposed to
portray evil incarnate. The second memory angered him, for he had always taken his short hours of
off-stage private life as a right and not just as a privilege.

     Now, as consciousness was complete and his body began to react a bit to the commands he gave it,
he wanted to escape. Whether it was the mischeviousness of all puppets, or whether the experiences
of the butchered creations had done something to his mind, one could not say at this point. Later, it could
be seen that the latter explanation was the more likely.



     Wolf sat up in the nutrient bath. The viscous fluid ran down his dark sides, dripping into the tray. It
fell from his wings like gravy from the bulk of a holiday fowl come suddenly and unappetizingly to life just
before the ritual of carving.

   Noname and Sebastian were to the right, half turned from the equipment, filling two glasses of
unequal size. They did not seem to notice that Wolf was fully active. Or perhaps they did not care. In any
event, he determined to make the most of the fortunate circumstances.

    Noname giggled.

    Wolf stood, raised his wings to full spread, tested them quietly. They were still damp, though he had
no feathers to be clogged. The water and the nutrient salts suspended in it merely beaded on his dark
skin like so many jewels.

    Sebastian turned in that moment and raised his glass of black wine as if he were about to toast his
work. Even though he saw the poised figure, toes curled over the edge of the metal shelf, body hunched
forward, wings spread and at their arc, he did not stop smiling. Indeed, his smile seemed even to
broaden, as if he were pleased at this exhibition of his handiwork.

    Wolf leaped.

    He flapped his wings furiously and sailed toward the door at the end of the truck cargo are,. It stood
slightly ajar, rattling a bit as the cool wind caught it.

 Sebastian turned, following the creature's flight, still grinning and still ignorant of what the small, vampiric
creature desired: freedom, escape, sanity.

    Noname saw it first and shouted a warning. "He's leav-ing!" Over and over again. "He's leaving! He's
leaving!" As if the repetition and not the words themselves would set the idiot into action.
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    Wolf struck the door and battered it open without a great deal of effort since it was lightly hinged and
well-oiled. He struggled through, into the darkness of the late autumn night. In seconds, his wings had
carried him so far that the two in the truck could no longer hear the soft echo of beating membrane.

     A fog had settled in from the south, across the only stretch of fiat land, and now it hung between the
trees like the mist that swept through Sebastian's mind whenever he tried to concentrate too long or too
hard on any single problem. Visibility was cut severely. Trees loomed up sud-denly in front of them, like
prehistoric behemoths. Out of nowhere, vines tangled in their feet, like grasping fingers, like snakes that
wound about their victims and crushed them to death before devouring them. Here and there forest
animals cried to one another, and the bursts of inhuman conversation made them start every minute or so,
as if they did not know whether harmless animals or vicious demons made the sounds.

    It had occurred to Sebastian that puppets could not go any farther from the Furnace than a few
thousand feet without experiencing a harsh, bone-rending pain that drove them home. That meant that
Wolf was not all lost, that they might discover him at any minute. He could not remember just how far a
puppet could go, but he was certain they should have to search only a small area.

And still they found nothing.

     For a moment, Sebastian bad considered letting the small beast go free, but he had soon realized that
if anyone discovered it besides Ben Samuels-it would be a clue to their whereabouts. Even if they left and
the thing were

 found later, the police would know where to search for them. Wolf must be found, quickly, and returned
to the

Furnace, or all could come tumbling swiftly down.

    "Anything?" Sebastian asked Noname.

    "Not here," Noname said. The fog grew thicker the closer one got to the ground, and Sebastian
could see nothing more than the top of the puppet's head bobbling along beside him.

    He was frightened -and he wanted to go back to the truck and lock the door and go to sleep and
forget about Wolf. He didn't want to be in the foggy, dark trees, stumbling around and not able to see
where he was going. The fog reminded him of a spider's web. And for the first time in a good many days,
he remembered that the spider from the basement of the Grande Theater in Blue had gotten on the truck.
It was here with them now, and it might have come out into the fog, behind them, stalking them.

    He shuddered. But he went on; fear does not always justify turning back.

   "Why don't we look around up there closer to Ben's cabin?" Noname asked. "There's light up there,
anyway. The only light around. It'll make for easier looking. And maybe he was attracted by the light."

    "Maybe."

    Wolf did not seem like the sort of creature who would seek release from dark places.

    "And, besides, it's cold out. It's probably even colder for him than for us, because he hasn't had time
to dress, remember. He might think there will be heat up near the lights."
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    "Let's go," Sebastian decided.

    He loped up the long path to the cabin, with Noname barely able to tag at his heels.

    They saw Wolf almost at once when they reached the bay of diffused yellow light around the rude
cabin. He was swooping from one end of the porch to the other, close under the flat roof, like a moth
gone mad, darting at the two windows and the light that spilled through them, but afraid to touch, silent
except for the sound of his wings.

    "Hey!" Noname shouted.

    Sebastian took up the cry.

    Wolf turned and zoomed over their heads so low that he seemed ready to attack Sebastian. A few
yards behind them, as they were turning to look for him, he came around and flew back, low again,
toward the porch, as if he too were frightened of the night and the mist. He struck the window this time,
dead center, shattered it and tumbled through, screeching in pain and anger.

    Glass rang on a hardwood floor.

    Something fell in the living room, made a loud clattering noise, though it did not seem to break.

     Sebastian and the puppet hesitated only a moment, then ran for the porch steps. They found the front
door bolted, and they stood there rattling it for a few moments before either of them remembered the
broken window glass. Ben Samuels was cursing, and the violent, booming echo of this abuse drew them
to the window. The idiot smashed the remaining shards of glass that prickled in the frame. By the time he
had started through, the old man was not cursing any longer. He was screaming . . . .

    It was not like a woman's scream, not high and wavering but deep and perfunctory, delivered almost
reluctantly. It was more a scream of fury than one of dread, though there was pain and fear in it as well.

    Sebastian cracked his skull against the bottom of the top part of the window, almost fell backwards
onto the porch.

    He clutched at the sill until his dizziness was gone, then swung sideways into the room, falling onto his
knees. He felt a fragment of glass grind into his left leg, but it did not hurt enough for him to take the time
to examine the wound. He pushed to his feet and rubbed his bruised forehead which had already begun
to swell. He looked about for the old man and the puppet, afraid of what he might find.

   Noname jumped from the windowsill and landed on a rather large piece of glass which cracked
under him, though he escaped injury.

    Samuels was on the floor across the room. He was wedged between a huge easy chair and an
ottoman. A book lay rumpled on the floor half a dozen feet away where it had fallen when the vampire
had attacked. Despite his strength, the old man could not dislodge the small beast clawing at his chest
and throat. He beat upon Wolf's back, but the flapping, rubbery wings cushioned the creature's spine and
protected it from damage or deflated the blows altogether.

There was blood on Samuels' hands. But it was his own.
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   Wolf snarled, as if he were merely playing another per-formance of the horror story he had been
made for. All other parts of his personality had been driven down into him, and the blood lust had risen.

    "Stop it I" Sebastian howled.

    Noname ran toward the struggle. Even to Sebastian, who respected the fierceness of things as small
as spiders, the puppet looked pitifully ineffective. Wolf was strong, de-signed to overcome creatures his
own size, designed to kill them for the pleasure of the audience. Noname had been designed for life,
nothing more.

    Samuels had stopped screaming. His fists flailed weakly now, even missing Wolf's wings as often as
he made contact with them. His entire body kicked and spasmed, almost like one of a pair of lovers.

    Noname leaped onto Wolf's back, between the long, dark wings where the creature was vulnerable.
He endured the savagely flapping membranes that pummeled him on all sides, slipped. an arm around the
vampire's throat, drew backwards with all his might, pulling the beast's fangs from the old man's neck and
also cutting off blood to Wolf's brain.



    Ignoring the contestants as Noname and Wolf rolled across the floor in their frantic contest,
Sebastian knelt beside Samuels. The old man's eyes were open, though they seemed glazed. There was
blood all over his face, and his throat was a ragged mess.

    "Sorry . .." Sebastian said. He was crying, and he felt his head ballooning with a sense of inadequacy.

    "Sorry."

    "I Can't-"

    Samuels tried to get up. He slumped back, his head bouncing once on the floor, and he was dead.
He had died not understanding what was happening to him. Perhaps he had imagined that the
rejuvenation treatments that he took once a year in the city would preserve him forever against accidental
death as well as against the natural decay of his flesh. Or, more likely, he had long ago forgotten about
death. Here, alone in these woods, he was not a witness to the mortality of friends and relatives. He saw
only the trees, and they appeared to persevere, to stay the cen-turies, growing larger and larger,
sometimes suffering drought and other times a late spring, but always holding to their place in the world.
He saw, too, the flowers that bloomed every summer, fresh after a long winter's sleep.

    There was no predator of any import in these forests, and what small animals did die had the grace to
use their burrows as a final resting place, out of sight and out of mind. After a lifetime of hermetic
existence, perhaps Ben Samuels had come to think of himself as being as immortal as the trees, as the
land, the earth.

    Sebastian turned just as Wolf finished with Noname. The vampire had nearly shredded the puppet
that had attacked it. Noname was dead.

    The idiot's chest tightened. Suddenly, he hated the Fur-nace and Bitty Belina and everything that he
had done these last five years.

    Wolf flew.
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   Sebastian dodged the dark body, but by the time he whirled to confront it from the other direction, it
was upon him, claws hooked into his shirt, its head level with his jugular vein.

    He felt its claws rending the flesh beneath his shirt. Warm blood ran down his belly.

He grasped Wolf's head in both hands. A low, ugly snarl rumbled in his throat, worse than any noise the
vampire had made.

    Wolf bit his fingers.    _

    He didn't notice.

    He literally tore the puppet's head from its shoulders. Wolf's doll-sized mouth worked even after he
had been decapitated, as if he could reach out from death and re-spond to this indignity perpetrated upon
him.

    Sebastian wrung the torn neck until the blood stopped running. He threw the remains down. And as
quickly as the rage had come, it passed, loneliness settling in its place. The loneliness brought exhaustion,
and he sank to the floor, his chin against his chest.

    He sat there for a long while. Then, slowly, he rose and began the now familiar ritual of disposal of
the corpses . .

    He tried to re-create Noname. But now that he knew how to work the controls of the Furnace, he
could not call forth any twisted creatures. If Noname was brought to life, he did not recognize him.

    He slept.



    Two days after the murders, Sebastian found the Holistian Pearl in the pocket of the coat he had
worn that night he left Springsun. It was a darker gray than he had ever seen it. He had heard that when a
Pearl became black it was still not dead, though living only subliminally. He rolled it back and forth
between his fingers, watching it grow lighter and lighter, just as it had in Pertos' hands so many times
before.

    When he thought of Pertos, he thought of Ben Samuels and Noname, and he put the Pearl down in
disgust.

    After supper he took the Pearl in his hands again. There are those who contend that a Holistian Pearl
is not just a bauble that can produce hallucinations or call up the mem-ories of past owners, but a
personality that seeks out those who need comforting. They say that, in a room with many bright objects,
the distressed man will always pick up the Pearl, even if he does not know what it is and what it can do
for him. And so it was that the idiot sat down with the jewel again, even though he did not wish to touch
some-thing that had belonged to Pertos and that now had associ-ations with death.

    The Pearl grew white as he touched it, caressed it.

    He relaxed as the tendrils of manipulatory power thread-ed outwards from the jewel and reached his
brain.
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    He was rising through the air, and the Earth was dwind-ling behind him. He watched this with
fascination. He laughed with delight when the moon drew near in seconds, passed by and dwindled like
the motherworld had.

    The Pearl took him farther.

    There were stars.

     And soon there were ships, thousands of them, and he knew it was a colony of space gypsies that
had never touched earth. And then the panic started. He realized he was not on solid ground either, and
that old fear of aimless-ness, of unstable surroundings, struck him with the force of a mallet, driving him in
on himself.

He woke, shouting senseless things, and he threw the Pearl across the room. It snapped against the wall
of the cargo hold, hit the floor, and rolled back to him. He did not pick it up again.

    A week after the murders, on the first of many very cold days to come, he walked up the slope to the
empty cabin. There were a few snow flurries in the sir and they dropped softly on his eyelashes, melted
on his face and streamed down. He liked snow, and he was feeling better than he had in some time.
The cabin door was unlocked, as it had been since the night of Samuels' death. He had not been back
since, but now he wanted to get the keys to drive the Rover down to the truck and charge his own
vehicle's battery, as the old man had taught him.

    The keys were on a pegboard in the kitchen, and he found them easily. If he had left then, all might
have remained as it was. But he had never been inside the old man's bedroom, and he was curious. He
pushed the door open and peered in at hand-carved furniture, a cozy place full of bookshelves. He
stepped into the chamber, smiling at the sense of security the place seemed to emanate . . . .

    And nearly walked right into the spider's web.

    It was inches in front of his face, hanging from open beams on the low ceiling, an enormous piece of
work. One huge black bitch spider watched him, or appeared to. Around her, half a dozen smaller
spiders scurried along the outermost reaches of the silken highways.

    He could not move.

    She came closer, descending on a silvered thread.

    He was perspiring.

    She had green markings across her back.

    "No," he said.

    But she didn't stop.

    "Sorry," he said.

   She tensed, as if she would leap from the web and scrabble across his face to hide in the uncut
masses of his hair.
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    She was so close he could see the spitting fibers flowing from her mouth, forming new lines.

    "Pertos!" he shouted. "Pertos!"

    There was no response.

    "Help me I "

    There was quiet.

    "Pertos!" This last call was strung out, each syllable many seconds long, agonized. He turned and ran,
ran as fast as he could for the trailer of the puppet master's truck. Inside, he hid himself, alone with the
single light.

At two in the morning the light burned out, leaving him in complete darkness. It was a night of terror, for
he kept hearing the sound of a thousand spiders stalking him across the cold metal floor.

    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
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    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 discov-er 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 crea-tures.
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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 hum-ming rotars
of the air-cushion system became a way of life, and the routine settled his nerves somewhat.

    On the fourth day, several hundred miles northwest of Ben Samuels' cabin, she asked the question
that he had been afraid she would ask all along. "When will you resur-rect the others?"

    "Others?" But he knew who she meant. He knew.

    "Wissa and the prince. The others. They have to be called up sooner or later for the performance,
and it might as well be sooner."

    "No . . . show," he told her.

   She thought about that a while, as if she were not really surprised at all. "You could still call them up.
They have their rights, you know, as much as you do."

    "No."

    "Why?"

    "No."

    "Well, you must have a reason I People just don't do things without having some reason I "

    "Spiders," he told her, though he did not know exactly what he meant by that.

    "Spiders?"

    He said nothing more, just drove and watched the snow and hoped that she would forget about it.
He was fright-ened of the prospect of having several puppets alive at once. Neither he nor Bitty Belina,
after all, was living a normal story, the life script that had been intended for them. Each of them had gone
against his script. That was confusing enough. If there were a dozen of them about, each doing whatever
he pleased instead of what he was supposed to do, it would cease to be confusion and turn swiftly into
chaos.

    "Will you create them? Please? I would like that."

    He did not reply.
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    After a long while, she said, "You killed Pertos."

    "You wanted it."

   "But you were the one who did it. How? With a gun? No, I suppose you would have used something
more crude than that, like a knife or a club. Was that it? And what did you do with the corpse?"

    "Don't talk."

    "I could report you, you know. I could turn you in and let the police have you"

In his mind was a picture of a small room with cold stone walls and a platform of boards for a bed. He
was chained to the wall, and they kept coming in every hour or so to beat him, like they did with stupid
boys who had to be put away. "Don't," he told her.

    "Maybe that's what I'll do first chance I get. First time we see someone, I'll tell them."

    He reached for her. She bit his hand, opening one of the wounds that Wolf had given him. Blood
dripped from the tips of his fingers, soiled her white dress.

    "Then they'll lock you away," she said.

    This time, he swatted her with his open hand. She was knocked off her perch and crumpled on the
floor in the recess beneath the dashboard. She didn't move for such a long time that he began to think she
might be dead. He stopped the truck and felt over her, blushing and nervous.

   Her heart was beating. She breathed. Gently, he lifted her onto the seat and laid her down. And
drove on.

    When she regained consciousness again, she struggled to sit up. She got onto the stack of blankets
and sat watching the snow fall for more than two hours. She did not speak a single word to him, even
though he attempted to start a conversation more than once. When she did speak, her voice was fierce,
her tiny face lined and reddened. "You ought to be locked up," she said. "You're nothing more than a
damned animal. They shouldn't let you run around loose."

And he felt so awful that he did nothing but agree with her. "Yes," he said contritely, not able to look at
her, ashamed of himself. "Yes."

    On the fifth day, they stopped at a charging station, and Sebastian hooked up the truck's battery to
one of the plugs along the fueling island. They went inside the automat and had some warm food,
watching the snow fall through the three glass walls. It was getting quite deep. There were more than ten
inches on the ground, though it was all soft and presented little difficulty to the air blades of a vehicle as
large as theirs.

     It was when they had gone back to the truck and he had disconnected the cable from the battery that
the trouble came. He was opening the door on his side of the cab when a long, wide cargo shuttle
fluttered in from the highway, heading southeast. There was a large, bearded man behind the wheel, his
long hair held out of his face by a headband. He brought his lorry alongside the fueling island and popped
open the ten charging portals along the hood by touching some control inside. Sebastian watched him
unto he was stepping out of his van before the idiot realized the danger here. He swung inside his own
truck and slammed the door, fumbled desperately at the controls, as if he had forgotten how to drive.
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Bitty Belina screamed.

    Fortunately, the windows of the truck were closed, and her shout coincided with the slam of the
lorry's door as the burly driver stepped onto the carpet of snow.

    Sebastian grabbed her, wrestled her onto his lap, holding her down so that she could not be seen
from without.

    She chewed viciously at the hand clamped across her mouth, and her small, bare feet still managed to
hurt him when she drove them into his crotch in a frenzy to be free.

   He could not operate the controls with her in his hands. But if he let go of her to start the truck and
move out, she would call for the other man and report the murder of Pertos. And they would find out
about Ben Samuels. And then the small room, the torture, the meager meals and the boards to sleep on.

    The lorry driver connected ten cables to his line of batteries, moving with the expertise of a man long
in his business.

    Sebastian did not know what to do. He thought that he might wait it out, even if the stranger decided
to have a hot meal and let his batteries charge at a slower rate. His hand was bleeding quite a bit, and her
teeth made deep gouges into his flesh. He felt dizzy, as if be would pass out.

   Then he saw that the stranger was looking over at him. The man waved and started across, kicking
snow with his knee-length boots. It must get lonely for a man on the deserted northern highway, and
companionship must be taken whenever it is available.

    Bitty Belina's muffled cries grew louder, for Sebastian's hands were too weak and torn to hold her
firmly any longer.

    The lorry driver was halfway to Sebastian's truck.

    Soon he would hear the desperate struggle, for the falling snow made no sounds to mask it.

    Sebastian snapped her neck and killed her instantly. He dropped her on the floor between his legs.
His profusely bleeding hand was afire, and he was seeing stars all about him, even though the sky was
cloudy and even though it was not yet night.

   He let the brake off, turned the wheel sharply toward the road, and shot forth, leaving that place.
Clouds of snow obscured the stranger and the long cargo van attached to the charging cables.

    He struck a mileage post and sheared it off. It clattered in the rotars several seconds before it was
kicked loose. He bounced across the curb and whooshed down the highway, seeking oblivion in the gray
and the white of the chiaros-curo North.

    Between his feet, Bitty Belina groaned as a bubble of gas escaped her stomach and rumbled through
her corpse, pop-ping her dead lips ....



    In the Vonopoen Book of Wisdom, the Rogue Saint Eclesi-an tells us: "Saint Zenopau had previously
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shown us that God's offspring usurp their father's throne every generation, so that we are constantly
under the supervision of a new diety, each of us a slave to several masters in our lifetime. Let me extend
this Truth a bit further. In the early days of the new God's reign, he is more sympathetic to his charges,
we humble mortals, than he will be later. Having deposed his father, he is determined to correct the
injustice done his charges. It is during this period, before he becomes as cynical as his father, that we
must arise and crush him. It is then that we will become our own masters"

 Later, Eclesian indulges in an altogether unsaintly dis-course on the sexuality of fanatically religious
females, then returns to the rhetoric of revolution with: "Perhaps as God's creations, we can never hope
to have greater physical power than he does, for he is born with omnipotence, with thunder in his voice
and lightning in his hands and all that other mystical claptrap that is nonetheless formidable for its
mysticism. But we can and will one day be more cun-ning and clever than he. God is the mark. We are
the con men. One day we will pull the shuffle on him, and then history will really begin my brothers-and
my sisters. Then history will begin with fury!"



    She was subdued, sitting on her blankets, re-created with the full memory of how easily he had
destroyed her. She spoke very little, and even what she did say was offered in a tone of deference.

    At night, in the back of the truck, as he sat drinking black wine, she danced for him, and she spoke
lines from her old story which neither of them had forgotten. He would call out the start of a favourite
speech to her and she would answer with the rest of it, grimacing and gesturing, prancing and posturing
as seriously as if she were upon the boards before a full audience.

    Later, he would give her some wine, and then they would bed down for the night. They rarely
touched, and their existence together was chaste and very clean, as if neither of them was a human being
but some plastic and metal construct that operated without perspiring or urinating, without a single
thought of the flesh.

   They drove more slowly now, for it had come even to Sebastian that they had no idea where they
were going. The fear of aimlessness had come back to him briefly, but he shrugged it off. It might be
much worse to actually arrive somewhere, for then plans would have to be made. As long as they could
always be going but never getting someplace, he could allow himself to forget about the future and
concentrate on the moment.

    Sitting on her blankets in the cab, Bitty Belina would point out things that he would never have seen
on his own: geese flying in a V formation, brown against a leaden sky; stretches of flat earth where the
wind had turned the ever present snow to ice; the looming bulk of a distant glacier pushing down a
canyon, catching the sun and glinting with a blue-green luminescence that grew brighter as they
ap-proached.

    Only once did the idyll threaten to break, and then Belina saw it coming and managed to keep
everything intact.

    They had been drinking the last of the wine in the truck, more than usual, and she had already gone
through the lines from her scene with the third unsuccessful suitor in her story. There were a great many
double-entendres in the speeches, though Sebastian only laughed at them because she did, not aware
there was some other shading of mean-ing. It had often occurred to her that it might be to her advantage
to make advances to the brute, for she remem-bered his rage when he had found her with Alvon Rudi
and she mistook that for jealousy. Now, as he laughed at her mischievous talk, she was certain it was
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worth a try to seduce him, as far as a puppet could seduce a grown human being. Lightheaded, daring,
she approached him. As far as she could see, her sexuality was the strongest tool she had to force him to
do what she wished, and if that did not work, there would be no way to have him bring the others back
to life.

     While he drank, she stepped out of her clothes and left them behind her, her ample body displayed in
its minute flawlessness.

   At rest, he did not see what she was doing, for the wine had smeared his vision with honey, and even
what he did see took longer than usual to have any meaning for him.

    His left hand lay at his side, his arm loose, his entire body relaxed, and it was into this hand that she
stepped and seated herself, her smooth bottom warm against his palm. She lifted one of his fingers and
touched it to her breasts.

    And then he saw what she was doing.

    Fortunately, her reactions had not been extensively affected by the wine, and she was aware of the
fury that slowly rose in his face. She saw his thick lips draw back from his teeth as they had that night he
had killed the merchant. She saw his eyes glaze and knew that he was not seeing her as a person, but
was reliving some horror from his own past. His gaze extended down a corridor of years, not upon the
firm thrust of her little breasts. She danced off his hands, scooping her clothes up as she ran. Behind a
crate of foodstuffs, she dressed.

   She was trembling. She could almost see how he would have crushed her, how he would have
broken the slim bones of her legs and back.

    When she came into the open, reciting some of the funny lines from her play, he seemed to have
forgotten all about what had almost happened between them.

    They laughed and finished the wine.

    Wind rocked the truck.

   Outside, snow began to fall again, after several days of clear skies. The sound it made when the wind
whisked it across the roof of the cargo hold made Belina's flesh goose-bump into thousands of little hills.

 When the lights were turned out, Sebastian fell asleep almost instantly, but Billy Belina lay awake for a
long time, trying to think of some way to kill the idiot.

    It must be carefully done. He must have no chance for revenge. If she only wounded him, it was quite
possible that he would catch her and feed her to the Furnace and never call her forth again.

    But she was still out when she killed him, because she would be alone and there would be no puppet
master to resurrect the prince and Wissa and the others. She might as well be liquid flesh herself,
unfeeling and unthinking, rather than be the only puppet alive.

    She fell asleep pondering murder, her pretty face a dream of soft lines and golden hair and eyes as
bright as seawater.
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    He was happier now than he had ever been in his life. He no longer had nightmares about a blond girl
with a knife in her belly. Nor did he dream about his father stabbing his mother every night. He was never
plagued with an inde-finable guilt, and he seemed even to have forgotten Pertos Godelhausser and the
five years they had spent together on the road, drifting from city to city in their strange symbi-osis.

      They made only thirty or forty miles a day, driving slowly so as not to miss anything. With Belina, it
was as if he had four eyes, and every inch of the land dazzled him as it never had before. They camped
for two and three days at a time, playing games in the snow and reciting lines at night. Now and then,
Bitty Belina would read to him from one of Pertos' old books, and he would fall asleep listening to the
lilting music of her sensuously childlike voice as she recounted the exploits of knights and sorcerers, of
magi-cians and barbarian heroes.

   He could even hear her in his dreams, it seemed: pleas-ant dreams where the sun and the water
spoke like Bitty Belina and comforted him with heat and with coolness.

    When the idiot finally dozed, his slack face averted, chin on his chest, Bitty Belina quietly closed the
book she had been reading from and laid it on the floor. Rising, she hurried to the front wall of the cargo
hold where they lived. She climbed the rungs of a stool, stepped from the seat of that to the control
console of the Furnace beside it. She looked into the empty capsule-womb, then went to the pair of
knobs and worked them back and forth, getting the feel of things. She took a wafer from the identity file
and slid it into the proper slot.

    The Furnace lighted.

    It was bright green.

    Liquid spilled into the forming tray beyond the thick viewplate above the womb.

     She punched the left knob straight down, rejecting the project. The liquid flesh was withdrawn from
the forming tray and restored to the tank to await future creations. The identity wafer popped out of the
slot and was replaced in the file.

     It had occurred to Belina that she might be able to resurrect the others on her own hook. The idiot
had left the Olmescian amoeba curled toward the back of the machine, and everything was ready for use.
If she had remembered anything from all those times she had set in a nutrient bath, watching Pertos create
her comrades, now was the time to find out. And it appeared that she had learned and remembered well.

     At first, she had rejected the thought, for she could not see how a puppet could ever expect to
become a puppet master. She was not as bound by rules and patterns of life as Sebastian was, though
the concept was too large for her to absorb very quickly. Even Pertos would have balked at the
suggestion that he might one day ascend into heaven and become a genuine god rather than a demi-god,
guiding the fates of real men rather than the fates of puppets. The Furnace occupied a place of reverence
in a puppet's view of things, and no simulacrum regarded the womb with less than a fear of the
supernatural. For them, it was both heaven and hell. It was the void. It was the end, yet without an end,
the beginning without a beginning. To take command of it seemed no more than egotistical folly that
would terminate in some awful disaster.

    But when several days had passed without any other plan to take the place of this insane scheme, the
insanity looked more pleasing, less ridiculous. She gradually lost her superstitious awe and embraced
practicality in its stead. In that way, she was much like the Rogue Saint Eclesian, though she could not
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know about that.

    She had begun to read to the idiot, for she found that put him to sleep faster and deeper than anything
but wine-and the wine was all gone. Tonight she had finally dared to go to the Furnace and test her skills.
She knew the use of the controls and she knew the procedure for creation. And now she was more than
a puppet, though she was not certain what or how much more.

   She stepped to the stool, clambered down it and crossed the floor to the snoring idiot. He looked
immense, head

nearly as huge as all of her. And in a few moments, little Belina would kill him, no matter how big he
was. The thought exhilarated her.

    She found the scissors he had used to cut bandages for his hand, and she carried them across the
cold metal floor to where he lay. They were terribly heavy, but though her arms ached with the burden
she someow found the strength to carry them.

    The points of both blades were very sharp. Other nights, while he slept, she had made them sharp
with a piece of sandstone Pertos kept for honing his prop-making tools.

    Sebastian smiled in his sleep.

    He had slumped down against the wall, so that his neck was within easy reach.

     She could see the vein pulsing there. Or was it an artery? Never mind. Either way, he was dead and
finished, taken care of with the same cruel efficiency he had used to kill her when she had been trying to
summon help from the lorry driver.

    It did not occur to her that he had snapped her spine with great reluctance and with more than a little
guilt and sorrow, while she was going to drive the blades through his neck in what approached pure glee.

    Too, she did not consider that she could be re-created and that he could not be.

    She was still concerned that she might not be able to do more than fatally wound him and that he
might live long enough to work some revenge on her. She hesitated with the scissors upraised, then gently
put them down and went to the rear door of the truck. She pushed it open just a crack to give her
somewhere to run if the murder should be flawed, then went back to him and lifted the weapon again.

    He snorted, startling her, but remained asleep.

    For all the times Wissa died, she thought.

    His neck pulsed.

    For killing the prince that night you found me with Alvon Rudi, she said to herself.

    The scissors felt so good in her hands, the anticipation so sweet, that she did not understand why she
hesitated. Why not jam the thing down, tear flesh and watch the blood gush?

    Caution, she thought. I've got to have more caution than he does. It was perfectly normal for a
retarded man to live by his emotions rather than his intellect, to strangle the merchant when his body cried
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for blood. But she must not make the same mistake. Hasty action led to things done that had better been
left undone.

    For instance, what if she found that she could run the Furnace perfectly, but could not get the
puppets from the forming tray to the nutrient bath pods? Without the stimu-lation of the dark nutrient
solution, none of them would break the coma they were born in.

    She took the scissors back and put them away, returned to the Furnace. This time, when she fed
Wissa's identity disc into the machine, she did not reject the process once the liquid had settled in the
forming tray. Instead, she worked with the two controls, balancing them against each other, running the
colors just as they were supposed to be run until, at last, Wissa lay whole beneath the viewplate.

    She looked back at Sebastian. He was asleep.

   If I can get Wissa awake, just manage to get her into the nutrients, you're dead, she thought.
Together, we'll manage with the others-and before that we'll put the scissors to you.

    She lifted the viewplate, which swung up and back, then looked down at the lovely,
dark-complexioned seductress that played her stepmother on stage. "I'll get you out of there," she
whispered, though she knew that Wissa could not hear.

    It was impossible to stand outside the womb and lift Wissa free, for then she was struggling with both
their weights, attempting to raise Wissa and keep herself from tumbling inside. At last, perspiring and
determined, Belina swung over the lip of the capsule-womb and dropped in-side, landed on the forming
tray beside her unconscious stepmother.

     She felt ill at ease being here. It was like a human child waking and finding itself returned to its
mother's womb even though it was grown and could understand where it was. This was a region
restricted to spirits, and she was surely looking upon sanctified ground where no eyes were ever meant to
spy. To either side, there were thou-sands of wires and tubes, pumps that swished rhythmically, tubes
that carried unknown lubricants from place to place, icy with their burden. She could see the guts of the
Fur-nace to either side, back under the housing that shielded things from an externally prying eye.

    This was no place to remain for long.

   She lifted Wissa without a great deal of trouble and attempted to shove her over the sill of the
womb's exit by shoving first on the other puppet's buttocks, then grasping her thighs, then her knees . ...
Once she fell and she required several minutes to free herself from Wissa's weight and regain her breath.

    Outside, Sebastian still slept.

     She muscled Wissa over the rim without regard to bruising or cutting the small woman. Finally the
stepmoth-er was balanced there precariously, her belly creased by the metal edge, free from the waist
up. Had she been awake, her breasts would have pained her terribly for the way she had been handled.
But she was not awake, Bitty Belina reminded herself, and there was no time for gentleness. Drawing
renewed strength from a thirty-second rest period, Belina grabbed one of Wissa's feet in each hand and
strained to force her away. The stepmother was pushed another few inches into the open. Only her legs
remained suspended over the womb recession, and these were not heavy enough to cause her to fall
back inside.

Belina leaped, caught the edges of the escape hatch with her fingers, curled them over and held on tight.
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    She muscled herself, but found that she was too ex-hausted to get out. She let go and fell onto the
forming tray, breathing so harshly that she was certain she would wake the idiot.

    Time passed.

    Around her, things hummed and thumped.

    She tried it again, managed to force herself to waist level with the rim, looked out on the fiat field of
the machine's surface, at the only two prominences which were the con-trol knobs.

   Her face was red, and she could feel the blood pounding in her temples. Every muscle in her face
ached.

     She caught the edge with her belly, tried to get a better hold with her hands and slipped back inside,
striking the forming tray with her forehead and slipping mercifully into unconsciousness.

     She woke up with Sebastian's face hanging over her like a moon, his fat fingers jabbing at her. She
sat up, pushing his fingers away, and cursed him. Against her will, he took her out of the womb.

   She watched while he fed Wissa's unawakened body back into the machine. Her identity wafer
popped out and was jammed into the file.

    Now she wished she had killed him when she had the scissors at his throat. Even if she had failed to
get Wissa from the womb and wakened, she would not, at least, have been forced to look at the long,
pallid face and those deep-set, hollow eyes that always looked so damned melan-choly.

    He placed her on the floor and this time allowed the Olmescian amoeba to shield the machine. He did
not know if it would keep her out of trouble, but he seemed to remember that the alien organism only
responded to either Pertos or himself.

    "Hurt yourself," he warned.

    But she was already curled up, asleep. He watched her for a while, wondering why she had tried
such a foolish thing as crawling into the womb. He wondered, too, where Wissa had come from. It did
not occur to him that Belina could be responsible for that. She was a puppet, after all, and not a puppet
master.

    In time, he went to sleep.

   When he began to snore, Belina's eyes opened, fresh and observant. For a long time, she watched
him, loathing him. But there was nothing she could do about him. Yet. Move cautiously, she told herself,
and soon you'll be able to jam those shears clear through the bastard's windpipe.

    She slept unsoundly.



     They drove farther the following day than they had gone in any single stretch in quite some time. The
winds had grown fierce, but the idiot still managed to keep the truck near the roadbed where, when the
air cushion blasted the snow aside, it could find a good beater surface to keep itself aloft. The snow had
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given up the form of flakes in favor of gritty, rock-hard granules. The minuscule pellets rang off the metal
hide of the vehicle, hissed on the windscreen as they drove into the storm.




    When Earth had set out to beautify and modernize the world, there had been no need to conserve
money. The old economic system was dead. There were so few left behind after the Emigration that
anyone could have anything that he wanted. For some, this was not enough. They were the workers and
the visionaries who were only satisfied when they saw their dreams taking form before them. It was these
several thousand who reshaped a world, and the waste of putting a superhighway through hundreds of
miles of barren land did not occur to them. It was the completed project itself, not what it would
accomplish, that made the effort worth their time and lives. And when they were feeling defensive, they
would say, yes, well, perhaps it is, not a necessary highway today, but in the future, when the millions
return from the stars, we'll all be thankful for it. Then it will be a highway of need and not just a work of
magnificence.

    Of course, the millions never returned. But the mag-nificence remained, and that would have pleased
everyone who had a hand in laying the smooth stretch of road.

    Late in the afternoon they pulled into one of the widely scattered fueling stops, identical to the one
where they had encountered the stranger in the long cargo van. If Sebastian remembered how he had
broken Belina's neck with one quick twist of his hands, he did not show it. He seemed happy and
pleased with himself at his continuing skill behind the wheel of the truck.

    "Eat," he told Belina.

    She came with him, walking in the path he broke to the front door of the automat. She thought of
running, sure that the snow would hide her from him. But that was death, and it was Sebastian who was
slated for death, not Belina, not her.

    It was in the automat, then, that she found something that she could use to force the idiot to do her
bidding. It was something she should have known about before, be-cause he had mentioned it. But so
much that he said struck her as meaningless that she had not attached any impor-tance to the things.
Spiders.

    Spiders.

   Although the fueling station automat was warm and toler-ably clean, portions of its robotic
maintenance system

 seemed to have gone dead. There was one corner where dust had gathered and where some mold had
sprouted on the plastic wall paneling. Some of the automat doors deliv-ered food while others were
empty. And when the idiot pulled open a panel that was supposed to conceal apple pie, he withdrew half
a spider's web that had been woven in the cubbyhole beyond.

     A huge, brown spider fell onto his tray, directly in the center of a sandwich he had taken farther up
the line.

It was inconceivable that such an enormous spider, fully as large as Sebastian's thumb, could be
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indigenous to this place where snow was common nine months of the year and where spring hardly came
before it went. More than likely it had been brought up with the construction materials or with supplies
for the automat doors. It might have been the hundredth-generation descendant of another brown spider
transplanted from warmer regions many years before. Its origin hardly mattered, as far as Bitty Belina
was con-cerned. What mattered was its effect upon Sebastian, whether it was a foreign spider or a
domestic one.

     He swiped at it, knocking his food to the floor, making the tray clatter on the cafeteria rail. The
spider, however, escaped and darted along the innermost of the rails. He watched it go, whimpering and
calling Pertos' name over and over again.

    "There's another one," Bitty Belina said.

    He looked where she pointed, at the dangling shreds of web, and he screamed, turned, fell across a
chair. Frantical-ly, he crawled free, made it to his feet and through the door, into the snow.

    She watched him, unable to understand. "It's only a spider!" she called. But he did not come back.

    For a moment, she was afraid he was going to leave without her, but he only slammed the door of the
truck cab and sat there, shaking, hiding his face in his hands.

    Spiders?

     She stood there a moment, watching the spider in the web, thinking. She had been walking on the
rails where the trays were slid along so that she could see the automat doors to know what she wanted to
eat. The thing was within easy reach.

Sebastian was blowing the truck's horn.



    Belina jumped down, ran to one of the tables and picked up a large clear plastic saltshaker. She
poured the salt out and went back to the cafeteria line. It took a minute or so to gain the rails, but once
that was done it was easy to reach out, pluck the spider from the web and drop it into the bottle. It was
half as large as her dainty hand, but not dangerous.

Sebastian was impatient to be gone, laying on the horn until she was cursing him at the top of her voice.

   She found the second spider clinging to the silver rail and put it in with the first. They bristled, stalked
each other, then decided they were friends.

      Quickly she got some sandwiches and hurried out into the growing darkness. The saltshaker was
tucked under the band of her skirt, and she had pulled her blouse out to conceal the spiders. There was
still a bulge, but she thought he might not notice.

    And she was right.

    As they drove into the storm again, eating their sand-wiches, she knew that she had him in the palm
of her hand, anytime she wanted him there. And tonight, when they stopped, she would teach him who
was boss. Again, their roles had changed.
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    She did not bring the spiders into the open immediately. It was more fun to conceal them, to feel the
glass grow warm against her body and to know that this power lay so close at hand. She permitted him
to eat his sandwiches. When they returned to the cargo hold to spend the night, she ate some canned fruit
with him and enjoyed some bottled vegetable juice. She spoke some lines for him, relishing his joy all
the more for knowing how swiftly she could change that joy into terror.

    She danced for him.

    The spiders in the saltshaker waited where she had hid-den them behind the food crates.

    She read to him from a book.

    He asked for parts to be repeated.

    She read them over as often as he wished.

     The feeling of superiority was so strong, so exciting, that she could barely keep herself from rushing
to the saltshak-er, grabbing them out of it and waving the eight-legged little beasts in his face, laughing at
his horrified fascination.

    But she restrained herself, aware that once the bottle had been shown to him, this sweet anticipation
would be over and the thrill of holding an axe above his head would diminish when he knew that axe was
there.

    In time, his head nodded against his chest.

    His breath came out as a long sigh.

    He slept.

   She watched him for a while, then went and got the spiders. She stood beside him, looking up at his
wide face, and kicked him in the thigh until he woke.

    "I have something for you, Sebastian," she said, holding the bottle behind her.

    He looked groggy, and she wanted to be certain he was wide awake when she presented him with
her gift.

    "Do you hear me, Sebastian?"

    He sat up straighter and yawned. "What?"

    "I have something for you."

   He grinned. The poor, trusting son of a bitch, she thought. And she could hardly keep her laughter
down.

    "Hold your hand out," she said.

    He held it out.
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    She moved swiftly, bringing the bottle around and hold-ing it only inches from his fingertips. The
spiders were trying to climb the glass walls with little success.

    He looked at it a moment before he saw that the bottle itself was not being offered, that it was the
contents that should interest him. And then he blanched and tried to shove himself backwards, through
the wall of the truck.

    "No!"

    Do you want them?"

    He drew his hand swiftly to his chest, clutched himself. "I'll take them out and give them to you."

    "No!"

    She made as if to unscrew the top of the shaker, though she had no such intention at all.

    "Perrrtooosss . . ." he moaned, beating at himself, as if a hundred spiders crawled on him and he was
trying to knock them loose.

    "Do you want me to keep Pertos bottled up?" she asked. He could not take his eyes from the
spiders.

    "Sebastian !" she shouted.

    He looked at her.

    "You want me to keep them bottled?"

    He nodded, his head moving quickly up and down. He didn't stop nodding even when she spoke
again.

    "Then you'll do something for me," she said. "You'll take the amoeba off the Furnace. You'll resurrect
the others and bring them to life in the nutrient trays."

    He said nothing.

    She moved closer with the bottle. "Won't you?" she insisted.

    "Y-Y-Yes," he agreed.

    "Get up," she said.

    He obeyed.

    "Get the Furnace ready."

    He did this too.

    "Wissa first," she said.
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    He fed the disc to the machine.

    He worked the nobs, formed a whole and lovely villain-ness.

    "She'll . . . hurt . . . y-you," he said mournfully.

    "The prince," Bitty Belina said. The spiders were still in evidence.

    The prince was born.

    Wissa had already begun to stir. She sat up, groggy, and brushed at her skin as if she were dusty.

    As the body of the first unsuccessful suitor jelled inside the womb, Belina stood on the brink of the
viewplate, head thrown back as she laughed. Her golden hair was very golden, her eyes very bright
indeed.

 Even as she turned and looked at him, brandishing the spiders and taunting him, he could not help but
think how beautiful she was. Lovely, lovely child-woman. He was glad, now, that he could snake her
happy by raising her compan-ions from the dead.




January



     Saint Eclesian, in the Vonopoen Book of Wisdom, warns us against a chauvanistic-jineoistic view of
man's final war with God. He tells us: "There does not necessarily always have to be a hero and a villain
in a conflict. Indeed, most times, there is no hero at all. And when one considers the ways of God and
the attitudes of men, there can be little doubt that both factions would share in the villainy. When the war
comes, it will be every man's duty, however, to make his own decision whether man or God is the least
villainous. This may not be a noble manner in which to choose sides, but it is surely a fair one."

    Later, in one of his letters to the citizens of the city of Pocadion, the Rogue Saint expands this
warning: "You have heard me say that neither man nor God will be the hero in such a conflict. Yet, if man
should win, he must reject the memory of his villainy and proclaim his virtue. Otherwise, victory will be
hollow. No one raises huzzahs when evil overcomes good. If man wins, there must be parties and singing,
awards and medals and eulogies. This can best be insured if men make certain that God dies in a most
unnoble way, debased and groveling. We all know that a true hero dies proudly, and our self-confidence
will be bolstered by watching God expire without dignity and with-out hope."



    In the cargo hold of the truck, the walls and the floor had not been well soundproofed against the
incessant clatter of the rotars suspended in the vehicle's under-carriage, for the designer had never
intended for anyone to ride back there. Even so, grown men would have found it only slightly annoying.
The puppets, on the other hand, were forced to sit closely and to shout if they wished to be heard as the
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truck resumed its journey northwest. And, being volatile, hyperactive creatures, they could not be
satisfied with sit-ting alone or reading.



    Besides, they were busy plotting Sebastian's death, and they wanted to give the problem every
consideration they could. When the time came, it must be one long entertain-ment. He must not die
quickly.

 If they were to plot, it was necessary that they be away from the idiot. Though they had little respect for
his mental capacities, they did not kid themselves that he could not understand them. Too, he was a
formidable physical antagonist, even if he might not be quick. Each day, they broke the ten hours of
driving into two-hour shifts, and each of them took turns riding in the cab as a guard against the idiot's
whirrs and plans. The bottle of spiders was given to the guard and remained in the cab with Sebastian at
all times. That left most of them free to put together some enjoyable sort of murder scheme.

    "But when?" the prince asked, his small voice rather shrill as he raised it to compete with the shuttle
system under them.

   "When the time comes, we'll know," Bitty Belina said. For some reason her whispered sensuality
seemed to carry better than their shouts.

     "That's easy enough to say," the prince said. "But we've been planning now for three days. We have
all sorts of good ideas. Why not take him out tonight? If we wait, hard to tell what might happen."

    "Nothing will happen," Belina said.

    "The spiders might die," the prince said.

    "We feed them well enough."

    "But who knows about the needs of wild creatures like that?"

    "They aren't wild creatures, just spiders," Wissa said.

    "You're agreeing with her, then?"

    "Yes," Wissa told him.

   "Look," the first suitor said, running small fingers through his bright red hair, "we need him to drive.
So why fight about it? We can't get rid of him until we get someplace."

    "Your answer to that?" Belina asked the prince.

    "I'll drive!" the prince said.

    The others broke into cackling laughter, like a batch of chicks, pleased with the hatchery.



    "I mean it!" the prince said. His handsome face was furiously strained, red and lined and angry. "I can
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handle

the wheel myself. I know I can! I'm strong enough. Some-one else could sit on the floor and push the
brake and the accelerator whenever I told them to."

    "It might work," the third suitor said. He was the fair, shy, chubby one who in the play was stricken
deaf and dumb by Wissa..

     Belina cast a harsh look at the chubby one. "And it might not. And if it doesn't and we've already
killed the idiot, where are we?"

    "I agree with Belina," the winged puppet said.

    "Me too," said Wissa.

    "Yeah," agreed the first suitor.

    "She knows what she's doing, I guess," added the third suitor.

    That left only the prince and the second suitor who was presently on guard duty in the cab of the
truck. Even if he chose to disagree with the blond star of their play, it would be five to two in her favor.
And there was little likelihood that he would disagree with Bitty Belina.

    "Who ever made you the boss?" the prince wanted to know. He had his chin thrust out and his hand
on the hilt of his sword.

    "Fate," she said.

    Wissa giggled.

   The prince blushed, turned to confront Belina more di-rectly. "That's not a good enough answer for
me. You're a woman. You're weak. I'm the strongest one here, with the most muscles. I was built that
way, meant to be the leader."

   "You're getting reality confused with the script," Bitty Belina told him. She smiled sweetly, the very
same smile she always gave him in the last act of their story, the smile from the script.

    "Besides," he said, ignoring her sarcasm, "I have the sword, the only weapon here."

    "Was that directed at me . . . or Sebastian?" she asked.

    "You figure it out," he said, looking to the others to see if they were, perhaps, having doubts about
their original vows of allegiance to Bitty Belina.

    That was a mistake. He should have kept his eyes on the blond, his lover from the stage. The
moment his gaze was elsewhere, she danced forward on her small toes, kicked upward, and delivered a
solid blow between the prince's legs. He gagged, fell over, his sword useless now that he needed all his
strength to get breath into his lungs.

   Wissa was laughing out loud now. She jumped up and embraced Belina, and while the prince
watched, unable to move or defend his honor, the two women kissed. It was not the sort of kiss he liked
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to see them exchange. When he did see it, he understood that it was a challenge to his man-hood, to the
manhood of every one of the male puppets. The suitors and the winged angel didn't seem to care. But he
had been given too much pride, and the sight of them together almost gave him the courage to plot their
deaths.

    Almost.

    But there was always something in Bitty Belina's eyes that made him abandon such considerations
before he car-ried them very far.



     The long hours behind the wheel gave Sebastian much time to think, and he let his mind range across
the spectrum of his life, through black moments and light moments, through happiness and defeat, never
following any single avenue of memory to its end. Mostly, he remembered small triumphs and tragedies.
Indeed, he had had no large triumphs to speak of-and the tragedies on the scale of jenny and Pertos and
Ben Samuels were too huge for his investigation.

    The land was endlessly white and the sky perpetually overcast. There was always falling snow,
sometimes only a few flakes and other times impenetrable sheets that ob-scured the way and forced him
to pull over and stop for the duration.

     He came to know the puppets as well as he could know anyone, and he had his favorites among
them. He liked the angel very much, though they said little to each other. Even in the dim light of the
northern winter, those golden wings glinted and shone. They reminded Sebastian of peo-ple he had
loved, though he could no longer summon forward any name but Bitty Belina's to fit a golden image. He
disliked the prince quite a bit. He was a snide, harsh-speaking little fellow. He liked to tease Sebastian
with the spiders, and when he had tired of that, he enjoyed jabbing his sword into the idoit's thigh and
simultaneously warn-ing him against losing control of the truck. Sebastian's leg was dotted with little
gashes and tiny holes as large as the place where a nail might go in the hands of a martyr. He found that
he liked Wissa, though that surprised him. She was the evil stepmother, and she should never be trusted.
But when she spoke, it was softly, and she never taunted him like most of the others did. He didn't Me
either the first or the second suitor, for they treated him nastily, though not quite so crudely as the prince.
The third suitor, the chubby one, was just the opposite. He spoke to Sebas-tian more than any of the
others, though the idiot had noticed that the third suitor was the quietest among his comrades. They
talked about the stars if the clouds parted, about the snow, about the Furnace and the others.

    Belina, of course, he loved.

     He had created her in the Furnace, forged her with his own hands and without anyone's aid. It was as
if this single act atoned for everything else that he had done wrong. In creating Bitty Belina, he had
simultaneously erased his sin for killing Alvon Rudi and Pertos, for permitting Wolf to escape and murder
Ben Samuels. And he had all but forgot-ten a girl named jenny and the recurring guilt that had chased him
down the years of his life. Both because she was his creation and because she brought him this
contentment without knowing it, he loved her. He was enchanted by her golden hair and her sparkling
eyes, unaware that his creation might have other traits beyond the physical.

    He had even begun to think that there was a certain. scriptlike quality to their new lives. Every day
they drove down the windswept, snow-hidden highway, keeping be-tween the markers on either berm,
bucking the air currents. Every night he sat and watched the puppets talk and laugh in the rear of the
truck where they had made their home. Every day it snowed, either hard or gently. Every night it snowed
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in his dreams too. There was a quality of sameness, of routine, that made life more stable and endurable.
As far as Sebastian could see, the rest of their lives would consist of the northern highway, the cold and
the snow and the sky like ashes and the occasional birds streaking across the flat bottom of the clouds.

It would have been enough for him.

   Though he had not forgotten what Bitty Belina had done with the spiders, how she had threatened
him with them

 and laughed at his terror, how she had forced him to create the other puppets, he no longer held any of
that against her. She was too beautiful to hate. Besides, his fear of the spiders had quieted a bit and
would remain in the back of his mind so long as the many-legged creatures were kept in the empty
saltshaker. It was almost as if Belina had done him a great favor by putting the spiders where they were.
As long as he knew they were in the bottle and that the metal cap was on it tight, he could rest easier,
knowing they were not hiding nearby, ready to pounce on him. The enemy is always less impressive
when he can be seen and placed. So, as the days passed, he looked even more kindly upon Bitty Belina
and did as she asked.

    Had he been able to read, and had he ever come across a copy of the sayings of the Rogue Saint, he
might have been interested in Eclesian's letter to the Tolemedons which states, in part: "Man's greatest
advantage in the coming war against the deity is, perhaps, his sense of history and his taste for revenge.
We forget nothing. We crawl away to lick our wounds, delivered us by the Fates, but the mental wound
remains open and bleeding after the flesh has healed, only to be soothed by revenge. God, on the other
hand, has so much to consider, so many tasks to handle, that he does not retain the minor events of our
sub-cosmic world as fully as we do. When we kill him, he may very well die confused, wondering just
what it is we have rebelled against."

   The fourth day of their renewed leg of the journey, it snowed again. That night, in his dreams, the
world was white and old. .

    The sixth day, they found the city.

    It was snowing, and the shifting masses of clouds, fleeing across the low sky, threatened blizzards.
The wind had grown in fury through the long hours of the day until now it whipped about the truck like a
huge bellows, sent the vehicle from side to side of the highway. It was a test of the driving skill that
Sebastian had acquired, but he kept the truck moving. One of the puppets had said that, sitting still, they
would surely be rolled over. Moving, knifing diagonally into the wind and using a little of its force to
propel them, they were not quite so vulnerable. He didn't like it, but he continued to drive, even when the
threatened blizzard became a reality and the world was a dizzying display of flakes.

 Twice, he struck the berm markers, tore them loose, swerved back onto safe territory as the clattering
sound died away. He did not have to be warned by the puppets to know that if anything got tangled in
the blades below them, they would stay here forever, freezing to death when the battery died and could
no longer warm them.

    Belina and the angel both rode in the front with him, while the others curled in bundled blankets in the
rear, trying to keep from being bruised as they were jounced back and forth between the walls.

    Then they passed through some invisible barrier which toned the wind down, held back three
quarters of the snow and provided a haven. As the thumping windshield wipers brushed away the last
flakes, they saw the city ahead of them and stopped the truck with a mixture of relief and dread.
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     Many times in the past two months, running with Belina, Sebastian had driven by exit ramps that
were marked with the names of small towns, hamlets, minor cities. But this was something altogether
different. It rose out of the ice plain as if it were made of ice itself. Its fantastic spires tipped the bottoms
of the clouds. Its walls were a brilliant, translucent blue that shone with an inner light, a beacon of
welcome. The land immediately around the city was un-touched by the gale and the worst of the snow.
Though the ground was not bare, but hard ice, there was a less wintry feeling to the place. On the walls
and towers there was no snow or ice. The severe weather seemed not to have pitted the city's grandeur.

    "Turn back," the idiot said, voicing his first inclination. He was afraid, and he wanted only to
recapture the idyll of the last few hundred empty miles.

    "Wait," Belina said, studying the place.

    He waited. He had confidence in her.

   "Maybe he's right," the angel told Belina. "If he gets caught, they'll put him away and uncreate us. It
might be years before anyone buys the damn Furnace. Perhaps never."

    Bitty Belina had been watching the city intently, as if it were a mirage that would vanish under a
steady gaze.

    It was still there.

    "Do you see any movement?" Belina asked.

    The idiot and the angel turned to examine the city.

    Snow sifted down. A gentle breeze whisked the white stuff in eddying currents over the ice pack.

    Otherwise, all waa still and quiet.

    "Nothing," the angel said. "So what?"

    "We've been on this road for weeks. In all that time, the only thing we passed was the cargo van with
the gypsy driver." She looked at Sebastian to see if he remembered the way he had handled her. She
could still feel, or imag-ined that she could, the place where her spine had snapped in two, the pain that
had fountained through her before the quick blackness of death.

    Sebastian was oblivious to her accusing scowl. He still watched the dead city.

     "I still don't see why we shouldn't get out of here before someone sees us. They can't have many
visitors. You've said so yourself." The angel's wings were open. They shiv-ered, as if he would leap into
flight, as they always did when he was frightened.

     "Doesn't it seem odd?" Belina asked. "No traffic on such a marvelous road, and now it ends here-as
if they built this just to reach one city. There isn't any bypass here like around other towns."

    "So what?" The angel grew more impatient.

    "Think !" She was standing on the folded blankets now, leaning forward to look at the metropolis.
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"They built this highway to get here, spent a fortune on it. And now no one uses the thing."

    "And we look all the more conspicuous for that," the angel insisted. "They're probably sending the
police out for us now."

   She sighed, shook her head, smiling ruefully. "What I'm trying to tell you is that I think the city's
empty. Under-stand? No one lives there any more, if anyone ever did. If it was occupied, this road
would be in use:"

    "A ghost city?"

    "Exactly »

    Sebastian looked on the place with more interest. Wind. Snow. Clouds shredding across the points
of the towers.

Here and there, on the few large windows in the towers, the racing clouds were reflected. Nothing else
moved. It some-how calmed his nerves.

    "Why build a city and never use it?" the angel wanted to know.

   "They probably intended to use it. They thought that when everyone came home from the stars, there
would be need for places like this."

    "And no one came home," the angel said.

    "That's right."

    "Pertos did," Sebastian said.

    They turned to look at him.

    "Who?" Belina asked. She was tense, standing on her toes.

    Sebastian looked at her, at her golden hair.

    "I don't remember," he said.

    "That's better," she said.

    They watched the city a while longer, to be sure.

    "Now what?" the angel asked.

    "Drive ahead," Belina told the idiot. "Let's see what happens."

    Sebastian hesitated only a moment, put the truck in gear and drove down the last length of the
highway which now seemed more like an avenue as the curbs rose on each side until they became walls
higher than the truck itself.

    The road gradually began to descend as they neared the walls of the city. Hidden detection circuits
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registered the pressure of the truck's air cushion against the roadbed. Photoelectric circuits were
interrupted by their passage, and this data was passed on to the city's central traffic computer. The
computer woke from the non-think that possessed it most of the time these days. When they were within
a hundred yards of the blue stone facade, a section of wall rumbled open before them. Beyond, there
was a well-lighted, wide avenue that bored away into the city itself.

    If they continued, there could be no backing out. That gaping entrance was the point of no return.

    "Go on," Belina directed.

    He did not want to.

    But he did.

     The stone walls slipped over and around them. The entrance hissed shut behind as they were bathed
in the soft

 amber light of the glowing panels in the ceiling. Their engine was switched off by remote control. They
settled to the floor. The rubber parking rim of the truck squealed as it made contact with the black rubber
road. Instantly, the mammoth conveyor system jerked to life and carried the truck forward to the maw of
an elevator large enough to accept it. Then the belt stopped; everything was still and quiet, as if it were
now their turn to do something.

    "Everybody out," Belina said.

    By the time they were on the pedestrian walk, the pup-pets in the cargo hold had also disembarked.

    "Now what?" the prince asked.

     A computer-tape voice spoke to them through the public address system speakers installed in the
ceiling of the public walkway. "Please complete the provided form at the arrival desk. Your vehicle will
be returned to you when you request, upon identification of fingerprints."

    The truck was pushed into the elevator by the beltway. The lift doors closed behind it. It was gone,
along with all their belongings and what food they had with them.

    "You can't do that!" the prince shouted at the invisible speaker, his hand upon his sword.

    It was the prince's fate to be constantly challenging opponents against whom he could never win a
battle. Con-sequently, his rashness and bluster made him less formida-ble in the eyes of the puppets he
could handle.

    Bitty Belina only smiled. Every time he made a fool of himself, he gave her a firmer hand with the
others and ruled out the possibility of making a successful coup against her.

    "Damn!" the prince snapped.

    Wissa giggled behind her hand.

    Belina filled out the arrival form. She knew the idiot would not be with them when they left. Three
times the computer requested another chance to register her prints, uncon-vinced that such small fingers
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could be real. At last it was silent, as if disturbed but satisfied.

    "Now?" the angel asked.

    "Now," Bitty Belina said, "let's explore"



    The city was a palace, though much larger.

    Every street, park and apartment had been designed for gracious living. The wood paneling was dark
and well-oiled and generously used. The fabrics were thick and lustrous, the brocades rich in texture and
story. The stones were polished or carved in intricate designs that related the tales of Eskimos.
Everywhere the eye rested there was beauty, sometimes subtle and gentle, sometimes blaring and bold.
There was no dirt wad no sign of corruption to mar the loveliness.

    There were pedways and simple sidewalks, escalators and elevators and inclined plains for
transportation.Thoughthe city was large, one could get about in it as fast as one might wish. Or as slowly.
The city had been designed both to facilitate commerce and to offer the casualness of less sophisticated
eras of civilization. Though the hustle and bustle of modern living might appeal to some, it was anath-ema
to others.Thatwas one thing that had driven so many from Earth, into the stars.

    Many restaurants had self-help menus and food delivered by robotic beltway in the walls. Some of
these still had food that was edible and served it with a sense of style and culinary finesse. At least they
would not starve in all this splendor.

    Most of the stores were empty. The few that contained stock were mostly those which carried
nonperishable goods, things that would not decay or go out of style from year to year. There were
booktapecenters stocked with classics and proven titles. There were back-projection live-art stores with
hundreds of tapes in stock. The only stores with clothes were the sporting-goods houses where Arctic
rigs could be purchased.

    The only life they encountered in the streets of the city were the complex maintenance robots. These
came in all sizes and shapes, according to function, and were only minimally conscious. If the metal
janitors noted the presence of living creatures, they cared little.

    They were safe here, safe from the authorities and the Furnace. Though the prince disagreed that it
was best to settle in, he stayed with them. There was really nothing else he could do. In short order, they
had established themselves in the most comfortable apartments they could find.

    Under Belina's watchful eye, Sebastian transported the Furnace frown the truck to her apartment,
though he could see no reason for that now. He placed the pieces together in the familiar pattern and was
dismissed.

    He was happy these days. There was a slow, eventless routine to life in the city that appealed to him.

     He woke. He ate. He dressed and walked. Sometimes he saw the puppets and sometimes he did
not. In the evening, he ate with either the third suitor, the chubby one he liked, or with all of the puppets
in some neighborhood restaurant or other. He saw Bitty Belina quite a lot, and if she seemed often to be
trailing him as he rambled shout the city, he did not notice.
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    There was only one smear on the even beauty of the first two weeks. It was the evening of the
fourteenth day in the abandoned city. He had been walking, nosing through the closed shops as he had
nosed through countless theaters in his years with Pertos. He was returning to his apartment, sleepy, and
heard the argument in Belina's room: small voices raised in anger.

    The two loudest voices belonged to Belina and the little prince. Since the idiot didn't care for the
prince and mis-trusted the man, he thought immediately that Bitty Belina might be in trouble again. He
remembered the prince's sword and how it had severed Wissa's head from her shoul-ders in so many
performances. In the back of his mind, he also remembered the steel sword of Alvon Rudi which had
been a danger to Bitty Belina months earlier. The two sword images mixed, fused and became one in the
muddled confusion of his mind.

    "Goddamn you!" Bitty Belina squealed.

     He hesitated no longer. Grasping the handle of the door, he swung it inward, prepared to save her
again as he had saved her before. He was swelled with anticipation and eagerness to prove his value to
her.

    But it was not necessary.

    He stood there, feet spread wide, trying to take in the scene and understand it. There had been an
argument about something, but it seemed to have been more verbal than physical. No one was injured or
seemed ready to fight. No one was naked. No swords of any kind were visible, except that sheathed on
the prince's side.

    All the puppets had turned to look at Sebastian as if he were responsible for their feud.

   "What the hell are you doing here?" Bitty Belina cried. She ran at him, as if she intended to pummel
him with her

tiny fists. "Get out of here! Get out!"

    The others scattered.

    Ashamed of his intrusion, frightened, Sebastian slammed

the door and ran down the corridor toward his own room. He thought he heard a scrabbling sound
behind, the door open again. He could not be sure.

    He opened the door to his own room, closed it behind and locked it. When he flopped on the bed,
crying over his

own stupidity, he thought he could hear Bitty Belina be- yond the door. She was breathing heavily, a
mixture of

exertion and fury.

    Twice he called her name.

    She did not answer, though she was there.
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    An hour later, after she had let him alone and after his hysteria had bled out of him, he realized that
there had

 been too many puppets in that room when he had burst in on them. He sat up in bed, wondering what
that meant.

There had been at least a dozen puppets.

   The next day, when he was in the lower levels, looking over the places where the maintenance robots
were stored

between assignments, he saw two puppets he had never seen before. One was thin and very
dark-skinned with horns

 growing from its temples. The other was a woman, beauti- fully copper-colored, with a thin, black tail
like the tail of a

rat.

   He hid and watched them. They seemed to be scamper-ing between the storage tubes in search of
something on the floor. He could not tell what. He watched them until they were gone. They each had a
small tin can with a plastic lid.

It was impossible to discover what they carried in them.

    "There aren't any others," Bitty Belina told him.

    "Saw them."

    "You're imagining things."

    "No."

    "Yes, you are."

    Her hair was so lovely, her face so delicate and perfect, that he hated to argue with her. He wanted
only to touch

 her hair and her skin, to feel the softness and the golden wealth. But she had long ago refused to let him
touch even

 the ends of her yellow curls. The only way left to communi-cate was through words. And he was worst
at that.

    "Other night. Your room," he told her.

    "What you saw were reflections."

    "Reflections?"

    "We had taken the mirrors off the walls and had them on the floor. We were playing with them. You
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know how puppets like to play. When you opened the door, you saw all the reflections."

    He thought about that a while. It did not explain the two strange puppets in the maintenance levels
running around with the cans in their hands. He decided against fighting with her.

    "Maybe," he said.

    She smiled. "Positively."

    "I guess so."

    She reached up and touched his cheek then, trailed her slim, quick fingers along the line of his jaw.
For a moment of ecstasy, those fingers pressed against his lips. Then she took them away and left him.

    He was happy again.

    Two days later, in the sewer plant, toward the northern end of the lowest level of the city, as he
walked between the towering machinery that shone like new despite its years, he saw three puppets that
were not from Bitty Belina's story. He recognized all three, but could not tell what play they were from.
All three had containers of some sort and growled the nooks and crannies of the place, searching.

    He left there.

    He busied himself elsewhere.

    And he told himself that Bitty Belina had lied to him only because they were all planning a surprise for
him and didn't want to have him find out what it was. That would spoil it. He must pretend as if he knew
nothing, be quiet and wait.

   He chuckled. It was a mark of esteem when your friends went to such lengths to spring a surprise on
you. It would not be fair to them to ruin it all by blundering right into it.

     He was quiet. And he could hardly wait to find out what was up. No one had ever done anything like
this for him

before. He didn't even think he deserved it. But that, of course, was up to them.



    Bitty Belina followed Wissa through the square entrance to the air-conditioning shaft. The access grill
had been pried off days before when the puppets began using the hidden metal passageways to structure
their plan against Sebas-tian. Wissa carried a tiny flashlight, no larger than one of Sebastian's fingers. In
her hands, it was almost as large as a regulation electric torch.

    "If this is a game of some sort-" Belina began.

    "It isn't, honey," Wissa said. "I saw him myself. He's big and has a beard."

    "But what does he want here?"

    "I don't know. I didn't wait to watch him. I came running for you, first thing."
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 They didn't speak any more as they ran lightly through the largest of the airshafts. Now and then it was
necessary to stoop or crawl where the size of the pipes was reduced. They used rag ropes at certain
verticle shafts to descend from floor to floor. The ropes had been placed the same day they first scouted
the system.

They met only one puppet in their journey. He was slim and dark, with horns on his forehead.

    "What's up?" he asked as they went by.

    Belina waved her hand impatiently to indicate she had no time for foolish questions.

  The horned puppet followed them. He ran with more grace and with less noise than even the two
women.

    A few minutes later they reached, a wide intake shaft that terminated in an aperture that could easily
have taken a stooped but full-grown man. The grill had been left intact here, for the area beyond did not
figure in the murder plan they had devised. They stood by the steel mesh, the intake fans sucking air past
them, gently ruffling their hair and clothes, and they watched the bearded man who had en-tered the city
through the south gate, just as they had done a few weeks earlier.

    A long, wide cargo van rested on the black conveyor belt of the avenue. The driver had said
something to the traffic computer to keep the vehicle from being parked in the overhead garages that
accommodated hundreds of thousands of machines. Now the driver was busy assembling small robotic
cargo trundlers and was dispatching them to various points in the city, He had obviously been here
before.

    "I know him," Belina said.

    "How?" the black, horned man asked.

   "He's the one that almost found the idiot out. I tried to call to him in the fueling station, weeks and
weeks ago Before I could get the idiot to create you, Wissa."

    "When Sebastian . . when he . . ."

    "Broke my back and had to re-create me," Belina finished. The tone of her voice was ugly.

   "But why is he here?" Wissa asked. "He doesn't even know about you. And it wouldn't have taken
him all this time to follow Sebastian."

    "I think he comes here often," Belina said. "He's proba-bly looting the place, slowly and methodically.
I should have thought of that earlier. The first time I saw him, he was coming south. This was the only
place he could have been coming from. Now he's unloaded the last haul, sold it. And he's back for
more."

    "Maybe he won't discover us," the horned man said.

   "Wishful thinking, Scratch," the little goddess said. "He's probably been coming here for years. He'll
know the place well. He'll notice little things, small signs of us. If not that, then Sebastian will give us
away. You can't trust the idiot to be quiet."
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    The gypsy driver was preparing the last of the trundlers. His golden earring caught the light, glinted
like an eye in his lobe.

    "Get the others," Belina said. "Bring them here. Even if he doesn't spot us this time, we've got to take
care of him. If he gets away, he might not bring the authorities. But he will sure as hell come armed on his
next trip. Surprise won't be with us then."

    "What are we going to do?" Wissa asked.

    "Catch him here, at the van, when he returns," Belina said. Her voice was soft and throaty. She
shivered with excitement at what she was thinking, seemed to transmit her sweet anticipation to the
others.

    "And then?" Scratch asked.

    "Kill him," Belina whispered.

    Wissa grabbed the blond girl and squeezed her, kissed her. "Yes, baby! Yes, yes !" she hissed.

 Scratch scampered away to collect the others. There were thirty-seven of them in all. The Furnace
contained enough synthetic flesh to have sixty puppets alive at once. Belina had not found more than
thirty-six she thought she could dominate without contention.

    "How?" Wissa asked.

  The bearded driver walked off after the last of the trun-dlers to supervise the looting spree. In a
moment the arrival bay was quiet.

    "You'll see soon enough," Belina said. "Oh, Wissa, it's going to be great fun!"

    The gypsy trucker returned in half an hour, leading a procession of three robotic cargo trundlers.
They were stacked with boxed goods, and he had his arms full of Arctic clothes. He stopped when he
heard the noise of the van's rotars, looked up, startled.

    The long vehicle fluttered at full power, blades beating so hard they were completely invisible. All the
power was being used in a verticle maneuver while the horizontal mechanisms were braked. It hovered
ten feet off the black beltroad.

   "What the devil's this?" the driver asked, dropping the clothes he carried, scurrying to the edge of the
pedestrian walkway that looked down on the arrivals avenue.

   The walk was a good eight feet above the bottom of the road. The truck hovered only two feet
above him. He stood on his toes and tried to see through the windows. There did not appear to be
anyone driving.

    He had never heard of a van acting up like this on its own. Yet who was there in the city to give him
trouble? He wished he had taken his long-barreled pistol out of its glove on the driver's door. Now it was
out of reach and he was weaponless.

    He thought he heard the sound of chickens behind him, over the deafening boom of the van's blades.
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It was a cackling sort of laughter, tinny and uncertain. He turned and examined the place behind him.
There was the arrival platform with its podium and computer module. Along the wall were booths for
customs and the execution of certain types of business permits. They had never been used, and they were
empty now. There was no place large enough for a man to hide.

    The cackling came from his right now.

    He looked that way.

    A directory of city hotels. Reservation and registration screens. A water fountain. Again, nowhere
large enough to conceal the bulk of a man.

    Something giggled on his left. It was definitely the stifled laugh of a woman.

    He looked left. Credit and banking facilities for the arriving visitors. A series of glass booths for
private phone transactions. The empty swath of walkway.

    Carefully, he walked closer to look. He had the feeling that unseen creatures were scampering about
to keep out of his sight, from one point of concealment to another. But he couldn't be sure. He chalked it
up to his natural supersti-tion. Having been raised among gypsy truckers, he had had more than his share
of superstition bred into him.

    The thing was to find out if anyone was in the truck.

    He walked back to the edge of the pedestrian way.

    "Hey ! Bring it down !" he shouted.

    The truck remained aloft.

    He considered a moment before he said, "I have a gun here. You'll have to bring her down sooner or
later, even if you try to escape. I won't shoot now, I promise you. Later, I might be mad enough to 1 "
All of it was a lie, of course. Since it was necessary to deliver the speech in a loud, raucous tone to be
heard above the blades, however, it seemed to have more authority than it deserved.

   Yet it was not enough authority for the man who had crept into the van while he had been gone. That
man knew it was a bluff, and he kept the truck ten feet above the avenue.

     If there was anyone up there, he reminded himself. He still didn't know if this were some absurd
malfunction in his van or some stranger's piece of dirty business. His rugged life style told him to expect
the latter, while his natural optimism told him to hope for the former.

    The chuckling sound came from all sides now.

    He ignored it.

    He concentrated on the van. There seemed to be no way of reaching it that was safe and sire. He
didn't want to

leap for the door handle. If he missed that, he would slip down into the avenue and get caught by the
blades or buffeted unconscious by the furious air cushion. Yet, if the van broke down here, he would
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have one damn time getting it out. If it was a major malfunction that couldn't be fixed on the spot with his
tool kit, how was he to get back to civilization to secure the needed parts? Calling for help would only
land him in jail for looting. This was a sweet racket, this city of his own, and he did not want to destroy
what he had built for himself here.

    Damn that chuckling noise!

    With that and the blades only a few feet away, it was impossible to think clearly.

    He turned to walk away from the worst of the rotars' noise and confronted six of the puppets on his
right. They had come out from behind the hotel directory and the water fountain. Each of them held a
sharp steak knife of the sort one was given in a robotic restaurant. Each of them was grinning. Their eyes
were bright.

    He did not understand what was happening. First of all, it was impossible to cope with the sight of
the diminutive creatures in such short order. His mind accepted their presence, but seemed to draw back
from analyzing them. He did know that there was danger and that it was of a deadly nature. He backed
away from them.

    Something pricked his calves.

    He whirled.

   There were seven puppets on the left. They had been hiding in the banking facilities by the telephone
booths. They, too, were armed with steak knives.

   When he turned to the rear, he saw a dozen puppets, some not exactly human in appearance. They
were lined up by the customs booths and the arrivals platform.

    He was hemmed in.

    One of the puppets on the right slashed his leg.

    He screamed, stepped backwards.

    He could feel blood running down into his sock.

   On the left, a horned puppet ran forward and drove his knife through the soft top of the gypsy's boot.
The blade penetrated the driver's foot.

   Pain lanced the length of his leg, seemed to coalesce in his hip, blossom from there across his broad
chest.

    The puppet did not dare' to pull it free. He turned and ran, letting it stick straight out of the boot,
quivering . . . .

    Neither did the gypsy dare to bend and pluck the steel loose. Now he was remembering stories told
by other gypsy truckers, stories passed down from one generation to the next. There were little people
who lived on the dark and empty highways. Usually they skittered off when you came near. Now and
then they were caught in the beams of headlamps. And some few times, they boarded a truck as it went
by and sought the soul of the driver. They were soulless creatures themselves. The human soul was not
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adaptable to their form. They had long ago learned this. Still, they tried another one from time to time,
especially -so the stories said-if that man were a virtuous man.

     Heavens knew, he was no virtuous man. Yet he was not so rugged and crude as other earringed men
of the high-way. He had never killed a man, nor raped a woman.

      Now he wished he had.

      He could not walk on his wounded foot.

      The line of puppets by the arrivals platform moved toward him.

      He danced backwards on one foot.

     In all his years on the road, in a hundred fights over women in the gypsy camps, he had never been
cut by a knife. He had always been too quick, too clever, too self-assured. And now one of these
midgets had driven a blade through his foot. Panic and fear had overruled his usual efficiency. He knew
that if he did not regain his calm shortly they would have him. Yet he could not stop the terror that
coursed through him like current from a live cable.

      It was not the pain that unnerved him so much.

      It was not their size or their ruthlessness.

    It was, instead, the insane glitter in their eyes, the slack and sensuous cast of their faces, as if they
enjoyed deliver-ing pain more than anything else in the world.

      "Novel" a beautiful, blond midget exclaimed, waving her blade in the sir as if it were a knight's lance.

      The puppets rushed him from all sides, squealing with delight, shoving and pushing to be the first at
him

He stepped quickly backwards.

      Too late, he remembered the drop to the avenue behind him.

      He lost his balance, fell.

      The blades caught his arm, tore it.

   He fell away, was pounded unmercifully by the air cush-ion. His arm bled freely. The pain was almost
more than he could bear, though he knew he must not lose consciousness.

      Then the truck began to descend.

    The blades grew closer; the fierce wind grew more fierce. Through the whirling rotars, he could see
the fixtures that held the blade shield in place beneath the truck. He could see the spot he had welded last
year when the shield had been dented and the blade had torn it open and punched it outwards. He could
see grease up there.

      And then the blades settled over him, chopping, and he saw nothing after that ....
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     "Wasn't it wonderful?" Wissa asked. Her voice was soft, distant, as if she still had not returned from
that plateau of hypnotic delight.

    "Yes, love," Belina said.

    "Did you see him trying to scramble out of the way of the van when it was coming down?"

    "Yes."

   "He looked at me, Belina, as if he wanted me to come help him. He looked to me, pleading with me.
He said something to me, but I couldn't hear what it was."

    Belina kissed her.

    "Will Sebastian be as good?"

    "Better?"

    Wissa squirmed with anxiety. "How long?"

    "Tomorrow night."

    "Why not tonight? Now?"

   "We don't want to get it over with so fast. We want to enjoy this killing first- When the joy dies; then
Sebastian. Don't gorge yourself all at once. After Sebastian there will be no one. For a while."

    "You're pretty in blood," Wissa said.

    Belina caressed her breasts and belly and hips The gypsy's blood was all over her. She had painted
herself with ;t

    "You're prettier," she told Wissa.

    Wissa looked at the crimson film she wore. "Tomorrow night," she said. "Really?"

    "Really."




The Last and First Night




 In his later and more militant writings, the Rogue Saint Eclesian tells us that all the cruelty of man is the
responsi-bility of God. He says: "Although the placement of souls in human bodies is an automatic
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process, it requires a periodic attention from the deity. When a new God assumes the throne of his father
he often forgets this chore. As a result, the soul-giving machines break down and produce soulless men
once every generation. These creatures have no scru-ples nor morals. They prey upon the vast masses of
man-kind who are good and honest. They steal and kill, cheat and lie, rape and torture. God does not
even consider what he has set loose among us by his careless handling of the functions of creation. If he
would attend his business properly, we would live in peace and good fellowship, for we are normally
gentle men. Is not this enough to make some of you honey-sucking, sated, smug religious men stand and
fight? If this cannot raise you from your awful lethargy of middle-class acceptance, then man must
abandon all hope of ever ruling his own destiny. If this does not send you to rebellion, if this fails like all
my teachings have failed, then my life is a waste, my message no more than an entertaining echo cast from
the ledge of a canyon. God-damn it, move I Move 1"

Eclesian was a wiser man than his contemporaries cred-ited him. His teachings have lived. And so have
his predic-tions, even if they have lived in a manner he might not have foreseen . ...



    She spent the day in an air-conditioning shaft, in cool darkness and the smell of dust.

She was alone, because she wanted to be. And the others never failed to accede to her wishes.

Now and then the sounds of puppet laughter came to her, carried down hollow tin byways. She was
oblivious to that, for the most. More often than not, she was tranced, carried away to distant worlds and
other times by the rich visions of the Holistian Pearl.

    For a while she had relived some of Pertos Godel-hausser's most interesting adventures. But that was
too uncomfortably close to home. The Pearl had sensed this and had carried her farther into the
blackness of space, to entirely different intelligent races, on other worlds.

     The visions affected her differently than they did most people. She was not inspired by them. She did
not see themes and relationships in the broad vista of civilisations she was shown. She had no empathy
with the characters of the dreams. She did not share their joy or their tragedy; she did not care at all.
Instead, she watched the bright explosions of colors and events the way a dog might sit for a time before
a television set: interested in the loveliness, in the action and the excitement of movement, but oblivi-ous
to any finer meanings or purpose.

    Yet she was so pretty . . . .



 The morning of the last day began for Sebastian as all mornings began those days. He rose, uncertain of
his wherea-bouts. He sat on the edge of the bed, cradling his head in his hands, trying to figure out the
place and the time. Gradually, he oriented himself. After that, it was a matter of playing out the script of
his new life. Routine called for a sonic shower to be followed by a breakfast of eggs and bread at an
automat only a block from his apartment. These things went well, leaving him refreshed. His hunger
appeased, he had time for curiosity and was free to wander until lunch.

     He was careful to avoid those places where he had accidentally encountered the strange puppets. If
they were planning a surprise of some sort, he did not want to spoil it for them. Bitty Belina would be
angry with him if he found out too soon. He could not bear her anger, for he wanted so much to have her
like him as he liked her.
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 At noon, when he came back for lunch, there were no puppets in the apartments. He had not seen any in
the halls, either. He checked the restaurants where they usually ate, but found no one. This was a bit out
of the routine, but tolerable. Depressed, he took his lunch alone, in an Italian automat.



     When, at suppertime, he could still find no puppets, he began to worry. Suppose something had
happened to them and he was now alone, forever? Alone in this huge place with its moving stairs and
softly murmuring maintenance robots.

He forced himself to cling to at least a small degree of calm. If something had happened to the puppets,
he need only re-create them in the Furnace.

    In Belina's rooms, he found the Furnace. It appeared to be undamaged, the Olmescian amoeba
drawn to the rear where it trembled slightly. He wondered if he should forge a puppet to determine if the
machine worked properly, then rejected such an idea. If, the little people were in some kind of danger,
he should be on his way to find them not wasting his time here at these controls.

    He searched the familiar parts of the city. The puppets could not be more than a thousand yards from
the Furnace. Yet there were so many levels to the city that three thou-sand feet could encompass a great
deal of actual space. By three in the morning, he had begun to remember some of the places he was
searching. He knew he had covered every nook and cranny and that he would not find them here.

    He returned to his own room to think.

   He felt miserable. After all, he was the big one here, the full-grown man. It was his job to see they
came to no harm. And now they were gone.

    While he was sitting there, the first of the spiders came through the grill over the air-conditioning duct.
It was black with white markings, as large as a thumbnail. It hung there, its legs kicking, then slowly came
down the light wooden paneling toward the floor.

    Sebastian did not see it.

    By the time it was halfway down the paneling, three other spiders followed it. They were all brown
and twice as large as the first. They were intent, actually, upon attacking the first and devouring it. But the
effect was of four spiders trying to reach the idiot.

    He could not see them because they blended so well with the color of the wood panels.

   What would Pertos have done? Sebastian wondered. He was sure the puppet master would not
have sat here, elbows propped on his knees, undecided. And yet, what was there to do but wait?

    The carpet in the room was beige, almost white.

    The black spider touched it, hesitated. Behind it, the three large brown spiders came after it, running
silently along the wood. The black spider skittered into the beige fibers, stumbled over them, mastered
their pattern and rushed across the room.

    Sebastian stood up. He did not know where he was going, but he knew he couldn't just bide his time.
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   The three brown spiders reached the carpet and started after their black prey. Because they were so
much larger, they had less trouble with the fibers and made better time, closing the gap.

  It was then that Sebastian saw the spider parade and froze where he stood, unable-for a long
moment-even to draw a breath.

   He had been thinking that Pertos would know what to do about the missing puppets, and he had
been wishing that Pertos was here now to solve the current problem. But he had forgotten why Pertos
was absent. Pertos was dead and had been killed by his assistant.

    And now, in answer to the foolish wish silently issued seconds ago, Pertos had returned.

   And he had brought three friends to help him against the idiot. Three friends: Jenny, Alvon Rudi and
Ben Samuels

 The black spider ran for the cover of the idiot's boot, only inches from him. Its long, wiry legs pumped in
and out, up and down, flailed at the carpet and propelled it onward.

    "No!" he whispered.

    He seemed to hear a giggling noise nearby. He looked around but could not see anyone.

    The spider came closer.

    Sebastian turned and ran.

    It seemed to require an eternity for him to open the door into the corridor. The knob weighed at least
a thousand pounds and turned as if it had never been oiled. The door itself weighed more than a ton as he
shouldered it open. When he was in the hall at last, the door seemed to cling to him as if it were alive and
had chosen to side with the spiders. Either his hand would not leave the knob-or could not.

    When he had freed himself and run twenty feet down the hall, he remembered that he should have
shut the door to prevent them from following him. He turned and went back, just in time to encounter a
brown spider at the sill.



    Jenny?

    He screamed, turned and tripped as his feet locked. He fell and struck the cold, tile floor with his
chin, jarring his teeth. He tasted blood, and he was dizzy. He had cut his tongue, and he could feel it
swelling in his mouth. Still, he managed to get to his feet again.

     He looked behind and saw the spider still on the carpet, as if it were not sure whether it should
follow.

    He ran.

    He almost did not see the other spiders. He was no more than four running steps from them when
they caught his eye. Fifty spiders in all, of different sizes and colors, though most were brown and as
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large as his thumb, barred his flight. Here and there, members of competitive species did battle with each
other. Some of them milled from one wall to the other, displaced and confused. For the most part,
however, they advanced on Sebastian in a maddeningly quiet run.

    In his muddled, terrified condition, with everything sud-denly more than itself, suddenly symbolic, he
saw that advance as having a greater degree of purpose than it really did. The spiders seemed to march
forcefully ahead, almost in unison.

    He stepped to the wall and opened the door to Bitty Belina's apartment. It was possible that he could
take sanctuary there; such ugliness would never dare invade the place she lived. Yet it already had . . . .
Spiders skittered over the beige carpet just as they did in his own apartment. Fortunately he had the
presence of mind to slam the door before any of them could gain the corridor.

    He saw, somewhere deep inside himself: two bodies dropped through a round kole, caught up in
dark water and swept away; a blond girl with a knife in her belly, bleeding while birds sang nearby ....



    He watched the wave of scrambling arachnids closing on him, and he thought he could hear the
feather soft thump of their hundreds of tiny feet on the tile.

    He turned and hurried the other way. His labored breathing was so loud that it smothered the other
sounds that he thought he could hear. The sound of his strained lungs reassured him, much the way a
jungle animal's roar makes it feel secure.

    "Please . . . please . . . please . . " he begged as he ran, though he was not at all certain to whom he
was pleading. For a moment it seemed as if the walls dissolved around him and were replaced by the
cold, white stars that Pertos had told so many tales about.

    He had gone only a hundred yards before he saw that spiders waited for him this way too. More than
a hundred of the leggy creatures skittered towards him. They were mostly brown and thumb-sized, quick
and determined. There were so many of them at places that the floor was obscured.

    Sebastian turned.

   Behind, the spiders had come out of his apartment and were blending with the onrushing line that
hemmed him in.

    "Pertos ! "

    The incantation failed. "Pertos ! Pertos !" No matter how often he invoked the name, his condition
remained the same. The spiders came on. The white-haired, ancient puppet master did not appear to
offer the idiot his help.

    To his left, across the wide corridor, a booktape store offered the only possible route of escape. He
ran there, flung open the glass door and stepped inside. There was a glass latch, which he fixed in place.
Now, at least, there was a barrier between himself and the spiders.

    The two lines of spiders converged, crawled over each other. Black bodies fell, were torn apart by
the larger brown species. Mating dances were danced. Death rituals were observed. Soon a common
mass of a hundred and forty brown spiders milled about before the booktape store.
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    Sebastian had expected them to leave. (he, rather, he had desperately hoped they would leave and
forget about him. Instead, they tried to crawl up the smooth glass door, fell down, tried again. They
swarmed up the walls of the store, filled the windowsills, looked in at him.

    He was safe for the moment.

    He was certain, though, that they would find a way through the glass before much time passed . . .



    Teams of puppets worked toward each other down the corridor, moving behind the spiders with
insecticide, sealing off the way. They wore cloths across their noses and mouths. The spiders retreated
before them and were soon forced to congregate before the store where Sebastian cow-ered.



    The prince cornered Belina in a side duct of the ventilation system while she was on her way to the
booktape store. He had taken her by surprise, flung her against the thin metal wall, his arm across her
throat as if he would crush her windpipe. At first, she thought he had finally gotten up the nerve to kill her.
Instead, it turned out that he was aroused and that he wanted her but was afraid she would say no.

    "Now isn't the time," she said.

    Now is the perfect time, and you know it!" he coun-tered. His face was flushed, his breathing harsh.
His free hand roamed across her small body as if it were a separate entity with designs of its own aside
from his. It touched her round breasts, squeezed them. It slid across her flat stom-ach, dug fingers into
her nicely padded hips, cupped one of her firm buttocks.

    "I don't know what you mean," she said.

    "You do. Now, with him out there, trapped in the store. Just before we get him. It'll be best now,
better than ever"



     She knew what he meant, of course. There was definitely something sensual about the chase and the
kill. When they had murdered that gypsy, she had felt the same thing. When she had watched the prince
and the angel lower the van onto the struggling driver, when she had seen the blades bite into him, she
had responded to the blood and the screams. Afterwards, she had gone away with Wissa. They had
smeared each other with blood and made love. Later, when Wissa was exhausted, Belina had gone to
the prince and to the angel. In each case, sex had never been so full, so satisfying. It was all sharp edges
and long slides, rising and rising and never falling, ballooning full of he-lium.



    "There's no time," she argued, trying to push away from him.

    He slapped her. His fingers left red welts across her smooth, freckled cheek. The moment he saw
those, he realized what a horrible mistake he had made. Stepping away from her, he tried to find
something to say that would appease her. But he knew there was nothing she would listen to.
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    She said nothing at all. She gave him one, long searching look which turned his blood cold, then
stalked off on her way to the booktape store and the final chapter in Sebas-tian's story.



    Sebastian realized that he could not remain in the store indefinitely. Before long, he would grow both
hungry and thirsty. There was neither food nor water to be had here. Yet he barricaded the front of the
store as if he intended to endure a long seige. He moved display racks before the glass door. He took
crates of booktape cartridges from the storeroom and lined them from one wall to the other. The spiders
would climb them, but they would be delayed a bit in the process.

At the moment, every second of freedom from the hairy touch of those spindly-legged monstrosities was
a blessing.

     Soon there was nothing else he could use to form an obstacle between himself and the
spirit-analogues of Pertos, Jenny, Rudi and Ben (as he imagined the spiders were). He stood at the back
of the main room, his spine pressed against the wall, watching the arachnids swarming at the corners of
the glass, hunting cracks and crevices.

    What would they do to him if they got him?

    Make him die? Take him to some place where there were no windows, where he would be chained
and tortured and punished for being such a stupid boy? Would they torture Bitty Belina and make him
watch that spectacle while he was also confined in manacles?

    A truly terrifying notion: did they already have Bitty Belina and were they already torturing her?

    On the top of a display rack, by the front door, a spider appeared. It was silhouetted against the
lighted window. Though he could not tell the head from the behind, he felt that it was watching him,
gauging him for the final attack.

    Somehow, it had gotten through the storefront, the scout for the main pack, and it signaled his defeat
by its very presence.

    He was perspiring. His throat was dry. He wished he were a boy again, at home in the woods,
looking for cen-tipedes under the rocks. Swimming in the hole in the creek. Hunting berries. Playing with
jenny ....

    He choked, pushed away from the wall.

    The spider was still watching him.

    He hurried into the storeroom and shut the heavy door behind. It made a tight seal on all sides. He
did not see how they could possibly follow him in here.

They didn't. They came from behind.

     He was watching the door for signs of activity on the other side, almost as if he expected the spiders
to force the panel inward, to tear it from its hinges. Something scurried by his left foot, inches away, dark
against the light gray concrete. It reached the wall and ran along it toward the far corner. A spider.
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Brown. Thumb-sized.

When he turned, there were more of them, spilling out of a duct in the wall.

   "No, no, no, no," he chanted. He was no longer attempt-ing to dissuade them from their attack. He
was, instead, trying to force a change in the fabric of reality itself. He wanted to unmake the spiders, to
uncreate them as he had uncreated puppets in the past.

    The spiders had not, for the most part, crossed the floor in his direction. Except for the one that had
run past his foot, they clung to the baseboard, looking for shelter. They were not nearly as aggressive as
the ones in the corridor had been, for they were not driven by the deadly fumes of insecticide behind
them.

    Sebastian did not notice this difference, however. As far as he was concerned, the spiders had come
around behind him and where there had once been a modicum of safety there was now only danger. He
bolted across the room to a door that gave on a small office only large enough for one desk. He closed
the door behind. It did not fit tight and would not keep the spiders out. Quickly, he crossed the room,
knocking things over in his haste. He entered the half-bath attached to the office, closed and bolted that
door.



   He imagined he could hear spiders pouring into the office, thumping toward the wooden washroom
door.

    He examined the bathroom several times before he real-ized the ventilation grill, if pried loose,
concealed a duct quite large enough to admit him if he crawled. Frantic, he hooked fingers through the
heavy wire mesh and strained every muscle fiber in his thick biceps. The screen creaked, ripped loose
with such suddenness that he fell with it in his hands.

Hurryl he thought. Jenny and Pertos and Ruth and Ben are coming to take you to the room without
windows l

It was dark in the shaft. There might be spiders lurking about. He decided to risk that, for he knew there
were spiders behind.

    He almost blundered into the whirling fans of the intake apparatus, avoided them with only inches to
spare. Cau-tiously, he felt around in the pitch darkness and discovered the tunnels breaking to the right
and left. He chose the one on the right and squirmed into it.

    It was necessary to lay on his belly now, for the pipe was no longer even high enough to accept his
crouched form. He tore his fingers on seams in the metal and quickly wore holes in the knees of his
trousers. He was as oblivious to the damage done his flesh as he was to that done his clothes. The only
thing that concerned him was escape.

     Ahead, there was dim light. He worked harder than ever, reached a bend in the shaft. When he
worked his head and shoulders around the angle, he found the light came from a flashlight laid on the
floor of the pipe. It was focused upon a human head that had been severed from the shoulders at a point
immediately below the base of the skull. It was deathly pale. The only blood was what clung to the
tattered pieces of neck that remained. The eyes were rolled back until little but the whites showed. They
were turning a sickly yellow. The mouth was open, slack and lifeless, showing well-cared-for teeth.
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    It was the gypsy's head which the puppets had salvaged from the avenue beneath the cargo van.
Sebastian could not know this. They had shaved the hair on the head into a widow's peak, and they had
died the hair a crisp, stark white. It was this one clever touch that elicited the re-sponse from Sebastian
which they had intended.

    "Pertos," he hissed. And there, in the bad light, the gypsy's features changed by cosmology and aged
by death, the head did look much like that of the puppet master.

    "Pertos?"

    The head said nothing.

    The flashlight shone steadily.

    The walls whispered, carried echoes of distant, hissing voices.

    "Pe-Pe-Pertos?"



   A spider, fat and dark green in color, crawled out of the dead mouth, hung on the slack, bloodless
lower lip.

 He screamed and screamed and screamed. Even as he thrust himself backwards, gouging his knees
horribly on the ill-fit sections of the pipes, he wailed without interruption. He felt as if his body was
swelling and swelling and that it would soon burst like a ripe fruit. The ululating scream seemed to let
some of this unbearable pressure loose.

 He made his way past the whirling intake fans that he had almost blundered into before. He entered the
left-hand tunnel, which he had originally decided to forego, wriggled furiously forward. He made excellent
time for such cramped conditions.

 As he moved, he had no idea whether or not the puppet master's head was following him, though he
expected as much. Now and then he experienced a vision in which the spider had hold of his one foot
and the head had its teeth sunk into his other. They were holding him until the main body of spiders could
reach him. When the vision passed, he crawled even faster than before . . . .



      The prince was sulking. He did it well, for he had had much practice in the past few weeks. Every
time he had been forced to relent and give in to Bitty Belina, he had gone away to pout. Though it did
little for his standing with the others, it never failed to make him feel better. Now he was refusing to go
with the others to watch the last stages of Belina's plan for killing the idiot. The scheme was a success,
and that-on top of her recent rejection of his affections-only made him more furious than ever. He sat at
the end of a long horizontal pipe, by the edge of a vertical shaft that connected the system on this level
with the system of the level below.



    It was there that Scratch came to him.
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     "What do you want?" the prince asked. He was as surly with Scratch as he was with all the other
puppets. The fact that the horned simulacrum was the symbol of evil and corruption and played Satan on
stage did not impress the prince at all. There was no real superstition among the puppets, save that
connected with the Furnace. And now that they had begun to control the Furnace, even that bit of
religious nonsense was waning.

    "She sent me," Scratch said.

    In the darkness, despite the feeble light of the prince's penlight, Scratch's black flesh blended
perfectly with the shadows. His teeth shone pearly bright. His eyes glittered, speckled with red flame. His
fingernails gleamed. As did his hooves. Those were the only signs that he was there.

    "She?"

    "Bitty Belina."

    "So even you are her messenger boy," the prince said.

    "Her aide."

    The prince laughed until he was hoarse.

    "I fail to see the humor," Scratch said, scuffing his hooves against the floor of the shaft.

   "Belina doesn't need an aide or aid. If the euphemisms make you feel better, so be it. But all Belina
needs are servants, willing to play infantrymen to her general."

    "That's enough," Scratch said. He sounded especially mean. His eyes contained more red than they
usually did.

    "Okay," the prince said. "What does she want?"

    "Nothing. Not from you, anyway. She sent me to kill you:'

   The prince rolled quickly to his feet, for he had been made for the role of a fighter. The sword that
never left his hip now left it-for the tight grip of his fingers.

    "If a death's her wish," the prince said, "she'll have it. Though it won't be mine."

    "Perhaps."

     The prince held the sword to the side, tipped up and forward. "I would say there is little doubt about
it. Your role is stealing souls of heroines and heroes and putting a fright into your audiences. My role is
killing. I am equipped for a marvelous performance."

   Scratch applauded, grinning. His teeth positively sparkled. "A wonderful soliloquy " he enthused.
"You're a fine actor." This reaction, more than any other could, unsettled the prince.

    "I am not acting," the prince replied. His temper was beginning to get the better of him. He could not
afford to give in to it. He had to be cool and calculating. Scratch would be beaten, but he would offer a
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good battle first. The prince weaved on the balls of his feet, looking for an opening to make his first lunge.

    "Neither am I acting," Scratch said. "Have you ever seen my play, `The Nicksboro Curse'?"

    "Of course not."

    "Let me assure you, then, that I did more than steal souls and frighten the audiences. There is one
scene, for in-stance, in which I tackle and defeat a hound my own size. He has fierce teeth and great
claws. But I cripple him and dismember him in center stage."

    The prince sneered. "Dismember him? With the help of how many visual deceptions?"

    "Mirrors?" Scratch stepped closer. His bare arms ap-peared to swell. Or was it just that the thickly
corded muscles had always been there, hidden beneath a deceptive layer of fat, visible only when they
were needed? The prince wished he had paid closer attention to Scratch in the days past.

    The devil made his muscles writhe and ripple as if they were alive and sentient beneath his ebony
skin. "Give me your sword," he said, holding out a hand.

    Before the prince could refuse, Scratch grasped the wick-ed blade in his hand, twisted it and tore it
free of the hand that held it. He threw his dark head back and laughed. The laughter echoed up and
down the pipe with the force of a dozen throats.

    The prince grabbed for the handle of his weapon.

 Scratch swung the length of steel by the blade, snapped the shaft into the prince's jaw. There was a
sickening crunch. The prince fell to his knees, spitting teeth and blood.

    "Was that a visual deception?" Scratch asked. He chuckled heartily, though he no longer laughed out
loud. There was a savage tone beneath the humor, a taste for blood and agony.



    "Why?" the prince asked.

    "Why what?"

    "Why does . . . she want me . . . dead?"

    "You really don't know?"

    "No."

    "It's obvious to everyone else," the devil said. "But I can see where it might not be to you."

    "Tell me," the prince said.

    When Scratch began to tell him, he dove for the devil's ankles, hoping to topple the dark puppet and
go for its throat. Scratch kicked him square in the center of the forehead, propelled him backwards
where he crashed the back of his skull against the floor.
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    "She wants you dead," Scratch said, "because you lack the necessary qualities to be allowed to
survive. You have the cruelty and the love of death that she thinks we'll all need in the future to fulfill her
plans. But there is a difference in the way you love pain. Your sadism is tem-pered by your egotism.
When you kill or wound, it is to make yourself look better. You play the role of the hero offstage as well
as on, always questing after the spotlight."

    "I don't understand," the prince said. He did not have the energy, yet, to rise up.

     "The rest of us enjoy death and pain for the intrinsic value in suffering. We have no ulterior motives.
We kill to kill and not to gain status. It is a cleaner lust than yours. It will lead to fewer failures in the
future than your own egotism would." He tossed the sword away, behind him, brushed his hands
together. "Your egotism and need to accomplish taint everything you do. When you have sex, for
instance, you sometimes spend as much energy giving your partner pleasure as the energy you spend to
satisfy your own needs."

    "Isn't that the proper thing?" the prince asked.

    "Not for us. Not if we're going to survive. Everything we do we must do for ourselves, for our own
pleasure. If the group gains from our actions, it is merely a side product of our own gain. Pleasure. We
seek pleasure anywhere it is given. And Bitty Belina has shown us that our kind can find no greater joy
than delivering pain. She says that we have been made less than men, but that we are consequently more
deadly and more capable than men. Except you, that is."

    "Me?"

    "You"

    "Please .

   "Please?" the devil mocked. "Please?" He leaped upon the prince, his terrible fingers pressing the
bones of the warrior's body from their sockets.

    His eyes were pure crimson.



    There is a point where the mind renounces its own emo-tions, blanks them out and utterly refuses to
operate again until the causal stimulus ceases to exist. The husband grieving for his dying wife might grow
hysterical on notice of her death. But the hysteria cannot build forever, forcing him closer and closer to
madness. There is a moment when it will become either catatonia or acceptance. The same applies to
terror. Terror is, perhaps, the most difficult emo-tion the mind must deal with, for it affects the body more
directly than either hate or love. It summons up adren alin, sets the heart to beating faster, sensitizes the
ears and the eyes. If the mind were not able to short circuit to avoid the more unbearable degrees of
terror, madness might very well be the result.

     The idiot had existed with terror all his life, living in fear of forces he could neither define nor dismiss.
It took him longer to blank out the horror that possessed him, for his tolerance was higher, but he
managed it. Tranced, he con-tinued to crawl hastily away from the region of the shafts where he had
encountered the head, but he had little idea of what motivated him. Twice, aimlessness overtaking him, he
stopped to investigate his circumstances. Both times, enough of the terror returned to spur him ahead
faster than ever.
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    In time, the tunnel terminated in the wall of a darkened room. The grill had been removed to provide
a swift exit. He knew there was a chamber beyond, for his fingers could identify wood paneling around
the edges of the duct. Too, he could sense that there was a moderately large room with a low ceiling. The
air was stuffy, the echo of his breathing flat and short.



    He only wished there were more light to see what lay ahead.

    He managed to turn around inside the thin walled tube until he could slide feet-first into the room. He
cut his thumb on the flared rim of the air duct as he dropped to the floor, but it was a minor wound and
only a physical one. He had long ago come to understand, despite ills slow wit, that the wounds of the
body were those to be the least concerned about.

 The place was intensely dark, too warm by ten degrees, as quiet as a cemetery. He took comfort from
this lack of stimuli, however. It seemed as if he would be safe here for as long as he chose to remain, no
matter what forces pursued him. Yet he could not afford the luxury of a rest, for he had begun to
remember that Bitty Belina might be in trouble. She was missing with the others and she had no hope of
freedom except that he could bring her.

     He crossed the room with both hands outspread before him, searching for a wall which he intended
to follow until he found a light switch. The floor seemed alternately hard tile and patches of thick and
loosely woven carpet that shifted beneath his boots.

    The light came on before he reached a wall, activated by someone without the room. It stung his eyes
after so much time spent in gloom. He used a hand to shield his eyes and squinted about. There was no
furniture in the place, though there had once been, judging by the broken film of dust on the floors and
walls. The chairs and couches and paintings had been replaced with at least three hundred spiders ....

    A naturalist could have told the idiot that an average acre of grassland in the northern hemisphere
contains be-tween ten thousand and a hundred thousand spiders, though man encounters only one or two
during an entire day spent in such places. The average walls and cellars of a house harbor thousands of
spiders too. A congregation of three hundred was hardly that unusual, therefore, except that they were
not in their natural habitat: walls, founda-tions, insulation. Such a lecture would have done nothing
whatsoever to save Sebastian. The terror bloomed more fully than ever, possessed him with scintillating
red blos-soms.

    He found the door locked and barricaded from the other side. He could not force it open.

    Spiders ran across his shoes.

    Spiders covered the furniture.

    Spiders crawled on his pantlegs.

    He felt one scrambling out of his hair, and he mashed it against his forehead.

    "Pertos!"

    Spiders.
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    "Jenny!"

    More spiders dropped out of the pipe in the wall through which he had entered the room.

   He began to stomp on them, squashing them beneath his feet. They pulped easily, though many of
them continued kicking even when they were plainly dead.

    He tried to kill them as they dropped from the duct.

 A spider half as large as his hand fell out of the shaft, black and hairy with the markings of a tarantula.
The puppets had found it in a sub-basement full of rotting food supplies where its ancestors had been
transported from some southern region many years before, perhaps by a gypsy trucker. Its species had
been kept alive here in the north by the constant warmth of the basements and the lack of natural
predators, though the conditions were not ideal enough to support more than a few such giants at any one
time.

   Sebastian staggered backwards, choking at the grotesque sight. To him, the spider was more than an
anachronism. It was a sign, a portent, and it boded only ill.

     In his haste to get away from the tarantula, he had forgotten about the smaller spiders. They were on
his trou-sers again, and a few of them had gained his shirt where they seemed fascinated with his cold,
gleaming metal but-tons.

    The relatively harmless tarantula sauntered toward him, its thick legs trembling.

    Mercifully, he passed out.

    Unconscious, he could not see that the huge spider ran from him.



    There were six puppets waiting in Belina's apartment when she came back. They were gathered
around the Furnace

with an assortment of tools taken from the dead gypsy's kit.

   "What's happening?" the rat-tailed girl from Scratch's play asked. Her tail wrapped around her
smooth, coppery thigh.

    "We have him," Belina said. She was grinning widely, though her expression would not have pleased
anyone but another puppet. "He fainted when the big spider came through, and he still isn't awake. He's
tied down in the execution room, ready for us whenever he comes around. As soon as we get this out of
the way, we'll go to him."

    Her excitement passed to the others. They turned upon the Furnace and looked up at its towering,
gray metal surfaces. For a moment, there was a mutually recognized silence, as if each of them was
reconsidering his previous determination to carry on with this next to the last step of their liberation.

   Then Bitty Belina climbed a chair, swung onto the top of the Furnace, drew herself to her feet and
motioned for the others to follow. They fell over each other in their eager-ness.
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    Strung across the highest surface of the Furnace, they wielded their screwdrivers and hammers, their
wrenches and oiling tubes. They smashed the glass viewplate above the capsule-womb, pried the two
control knobs off and kicked them to the floor below. After that, it was necessary to go inside the
machine as Bitty Belina had gone to lever Wissa out that night she had tried to create a puppet on her
own. In the bowels, they smashed tubes, ripped circuit boards free of their contacts. They shredded the
insulation, bent plastic wire guides, crushed transistors.

    At first, they had been reluctant to dispose of the ma-chine, for it served the purpose of re-creating
them if they were accidentally killed. In the final analysis, however, they knew it must go. As long as it
functioned, they could never leave its vicinity except under the punishment of unbearable pain. If they
were to build the planned empire, mobility was essential. Simple immortality would have to be sacrificed.

    The alarm circuits were triggered inside the Vonopoen device. The power plant flared. Heat washed
throughout the Furnace, melting the parts of it to incomprehensible slag.



    One puppet died in the furious eruption, though the others escaped unharmed.

    "Now there are no chains," Belina said.

    The roar inside the Furnace stopped. It was dead at last. The flesh in the furnace had died with it,
save that which now existed free beyond its realm. That flesh had entered a new Furnace, of course: the
world. They would set that afire in short order.

    "Sebastian," she said.

    They followed her out of the room.

 They had already forgotten their comrade who had per-ished within the machine's guts, although his
screams and his intense agony had given them a few moments of plea-sure.



   At the end of a ventilation shaft, by the open well of a vertical pipe, pieces of a body lay in darkness.
The thin blood had already begun to dry as the water in it evaporat-ed, leaving only stains. Though it was
warm here, the prince would not decay for a very long time, for his flesh was not genuinely organic.

His sword was clamped between his teeth in a parody of the lover's red rose.

Scratch had placed it there.

    The first and second suitors had been dispatched to collect the gypsy's head and the flashlight that
had illumi-nated it to such a good effect. They placed the light inside the thing's mouth so that the beam
shone out between the separated lips and partially illuminated their way. They stood on either side of it,
each by an ear, and they hefted it by the ragged and bloody base. Hunched over like cripples, they were
able to carry it to a loosened grill where others waited to accept it and bear it to the execution chamber.

   Now and then it was necessary to put the head down and rest, for the weight prohibited one long
dash to the grill. It was during one of these breathers that the first suitor, elbows propped on the head,
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told the second suitor about the prince. "The prince is dead," he said.

    "Who said?"

    "Scratch."

    "That malcontent? And you're going to believe what he says? How could he know if we don't."

    "He killed him."

    "So? On whose orders?"

    "Hers. Who else's orders are there?"

The second suitor smiled, scratched at the back of his neck. "I never did like the way he always got the
girl after we failed. Even if it was in the script." He laughed at some thought. "Though I suppose I couldn't
have handled her very well if I had won, eh?"

    "Nor me I" the first suitor agreed, shivering. "Not even as well as he managed her. Still, I would have
liked to hear him when old Scratch came on the scene. They say the devil tears a monstrous hound
limb-from-limb in his own play, without the aid of mirrors. I would have given a great deal to listen to the
prince under similar punishment."

    "Yes," the second suitor agreed. "Oh, my, yesl just to listen would have been enough I"



    Nothing was real any longer. None of it had ever seemed real, actually, though now it was even more
like the stuff of dreams, bits and pieces of illusions that swam at him through the soft blue haze that
sheathed the world. Time had no meaning for him. The spirits of the dead were as solid and interesting as
the capering puppets who ringed his bound form. Now and again he caught sight of Bitty Belina in her
golden aura, laughing with her bright teeth and her seawater eyes. Just as often, the blond was not
Belina at all, but his sister jenny who teased him and comforted him, angered and pleased him.
Sometimes jenny was alive and well, speaking in her soft voice, watching him with heavily lidded eyes.
Other times she was dead, falling away from the edge of a cliff with a knife in her belly, coming up hard
on smooth boulders, washing away in a strong current, the knife ripped free of the hole in her flesh ....

He tried to hold onto her when she was alive. But his fingers slipped through her and in a moment she
would return, dead again.

    The puppets taunted him with the bloodless head of Pertos. They pushed the grizzly thing directly
before his face and demanded that he confront it. This, they seemed to say, is the head of your father
whom you dethroned to gain your godhood. This is your handiwork. Are you proud of it?

    The dead eyes stared, yellow and sightless.



   "Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, PERTOS, PERTOS,
PERTOS, PERTOS.• The puppets sang until the name ceased to be a name and became just another
word. The world was full of words, and none of them could hurt as much as a name.
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    "PERTOS, PERTOS, PERTOS, PERTOS ....')

    The word was no longer a word, but merely two syllables of two harmonic notes, each separated
from the other by one tone, rising and falling, over and over.

    "PERTOSPERTOSPERTOS. . . : '

    Then the syllables were only sounds with no phonetic relationship to language. The sounds
degenerated into noises, and the noises became nothing more than a barely audible hum, like the unseen
mechanisms of the universe toiling to maintain stasis in the scheme of things. He gave himself over to that
hum, went up with it when it crested, down when it ebbed, like a piece of cork in the middle of some
vast, lonely and uncharted sea.

    "PERTOSPERTOSPERTOSPERTOS. . . :'

   The icy lips of the corpse's head brushed against his own lips. Their flesh seemed to stick together.
And when they were separated, the idiot was sure his lips had been seared away.

    "Tell old Pertos that you're sorry for what you did," a small, feminine voice ordered. "He came here
after an apology from you. Come on now. Say it."

    "Forgive . . . forgive them," he asked the head.

    "Not us l" Her voice was shrill. Her good humor had abruptly become bitter anger. "You need his
forgiveness!"

But he could only repeat that which he had said. He only made them angrier.

     They brought in the spiders and dropped them on him, one at a time. The tiny creatures crawled over
his sweat-slicked face, hung on his lips and drank beads of his saliva. They tentatively explored the
caverns of his nostrils with furry legs.

    Sebastian had no strength left to drive them away. Too, he no longer possessed the will to employ
that strength even if he should find it in himself. Long ago he had come to understand that the spider from
the Grande Theater in Springsun had boarded the truck somehow, that it was always with him and that it
would punish him in a manner like this sooner or later. He suspected this was the "sooner" though time
meant nothing to him, and he could not be certain.

  A corpse kissed him again, demanded an apology, again through the interceding voice of a small
woman. He repeated his request that the others be forgiven. The head was taken away.

    Sebastian's hands were flat against the floor with the palms spread toward the ceiling. His arms were
perpendicu-lar to his shoulders, like the wings of a dead bird. They had tied his wrists to ringbolts in the
floor. This must, at one time, have been a storeroom. The rings were for the securi-ty of precariously
stacked goods. Now they served to hold a dying demi-god whose time to cease demi-godding had
come. Where were the vultures that would eat out his liver?

   On his right, one of the puppets drove a steak knife into the palm of his hand. Blood welled up and
paddled there, dripped through his fingers, stained the floor.
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    To the left, another puppet followed this example.

    The same was done to his feet.

    Some of the servants of Bitty Belina had been in a play about a demi-god who was crucified in just
such a manner by the governments he sought to destroy. They thought it made a nice touch.

   Sebastian barely acknowledged the pain. He was not being stoic and playing the hero he had always
wanted to be. No, it was a mere loss of sensitivity that enabled him to face the torture with such a
subdued cry of agony.

Deep in his mind, there was a part of him which said he could escape. Surely he could. These were
pitiful creatures against which he was pitted, not a third his size. He could rise up in fury and rip loose his
bonds. He could bring judgment upon them.

   I created them, he thought. Pertos had them made and I was the one who brought them their final life.
And now they have me tied here, beneath them.



    He strained and managed to sit part way up. They hurried away from him, terrified. But it was not in
him to rebel at these indignities, to once more walk among them. He was infinitely weary of them, even of
the blond Belina.

    He fell back. His skull bounced on the floor and brought on a wave of darkness.

    He called to the old puppet master for help in this time of need. And then he fainted.

     When he woke, the tarantula was perched in the center of his chest, moving warily as it listened to
the thumping of his heart. Its black maw opened and closed, baring tiny, dark fangs that looked
enormous from the idiot's queer vantage point.

   He allowed it to scale his face without even shaking his head to dissuade it. Its feet were like the
down on a duck's belly.

    He passed out again, though more from exhaustion than from fear.

    Later, they took a fifth knife and ran it into his side. They offered him urine for his thirst, which he
refused.

    Again, he considered escaping. He could leap up, tear free and stomp them to death as he had
stomped the spiders not so long ago. And then, rather quietly and without any choruses of heavenly hosts
or displays of di-vine wrath in the heayens, he died.



    You know the rest.

    The puppets were immune to all human diseases. Their flesh did not infect, nurture parasites or
require long to heal. It did not split open with boils or sores. But for those who perished in battle or by
accident, they were immortal. They did not age, champions over wrinkled flesh and senil-ity.
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    The pace of their lives was frantic. They had no souls with which to appreciate the qualities of rest
and solitude, of inactivity and quiet. They slept little, worked long, sought the pain that nourished them.

    The immortality and the industry combined to make formidable warriors.

    They copulated, made the women with children, just as real women would have borne the young.
The Vonopoens had always said that the puppets were as like men as they could be made. This was but
another proof. The children were even more fierce and relentless than their parents when it came to the
pursuit of pleasure through the princi-pal of pain. Many of the parents did not survive their young. Bitty
Belina did. Wissa did. And but four others from the original thirty-seven.

    The new generations were not satisfied with the games of pain they played among themselves. Now
that the Furnace was dead, they had all the city to roam through. They made use of the long-dormant
computer and the other facilities available to them. In. time, they forged weapons, learned war and set
forth against an unprotected Earth where the cities were named things like Springsun, and Fallingwater
and Novembermoon, where men had grown rich and soft and somewhat bored. It was a one-sided
battle.

    After Earth had been won, there were the stars. That took a while, for the puppets found much
pain-pleasure on the motherworld to engage their interest for generations. Slowly, their stock of victims
dwindled. In a century, they looked outward on blackness. And they went to it.

     No race fought with such brutality as did the puppets. No race could stir in them the terror they
stirred in others. Worlds were abandoned before them. Life rippled outward through the galactic clusters
in an attempt to leave the puppets behind. But they always followed in faster ships with better weapons.
War, to other races, was a game, at most a very serious contest of wills. To the puppets, howev-er, war
was existence, the purpose of being.

    Perhaps even unto this day, the diminutive creatures might still be spilling through the void, tracking
the shat-tered civilizations that fled from them. Fortunately, the Vonopoens had been able to create a
special breed of warrior puppets with perfect fidelity to their masters. These were many-legged and
many-armed spider beings who were turned loose on the puppets, drove them back, and finally crushed
them completely.

    The spider-lizards, the Vonopoens, had built the puppets and sold them to human beings. The
puppets had risen against their human master by the use of spiders. Eventual-ly, they were defeated by
another breed of scrambling, black arachnids made of the flesh in the Furnace.

    I wonder what the Rogue Saint Eclesian would have to say about such a chain of coincidences?



   The Vonopoen artisan drops the Holistian Pearl. It rolls across the stone floor of his warren and
comes to rest against a golden tapestry.



    He stares at the white sphere a while, pondering the story it has told him. Then, shuffling hastily
across the room to the shelf of books he keeps next to his drug bar, he takes down the Vonopoen Book
of Wisdom which he has not read as much as he might wish, being more a man of the flesh than of the
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spirit. He turns to the gospels of the Rogue Saint, the only pages he has ever spent more than a few
minutes with.



He skims the text, flips pages.



    He finds what he searches for and reads it to himself as his stomach opens and closes on his belly, a
sign that he has missed supper because of the Holistian Pearl's tale. Eclesian says:



 "We Vonopoens have long prided ourselves on what we think of as our highest artform, our realistic
miniature puppets. We make them in our own images and in the images of animals and other races, and
we have them perform for us. Perhaps if we spent less time playing gods in this respect and examined the
universe more closely, we would discover that we are all only puppets ourselves, on a much greater
scale. We have our scripts. There are repetitious cycles. And somewhere, 1 think, there are voices that
laugh at us. Even at me."



    The Vonopoen artisan knows that Eclesian was ancient when that was written. Was, in fact, upon his
deathbed. But he remembers the spiders and wonders. And wonders. For once, he is pleased that his
own craft is something so simple and unimportant as weaving tapestries from stones and shells and setting
them in vibration so they sing for a thousand years.



And then he goes to eat supper.