We had attributed all the bad things of this world to "divine tests" of man's will and courage. But all of that was a theological falsehood, for the force energizing the universe was madness, not reason; insanity and not mercy. The madness had reached even the smallest particle of His being, aged like wine into the purest elements of horror.
Here died Jesus.
And Mohammed.
Here died Buddha and Yahweh.
But it was not all a loss.
For here, at last, I was born in my new image, to replace half a thousand false gods.
Burn the old altars and prepare new ones. Council your children with different commandments and slaughter the freshest of your lambs so that I may taste their blood in the morning dew.
I bled His energy away just as I might have tapped a dynamo or a battery, distributed it through my own psychic power until He was no longer a separate entity but merely another area of my own mind, as Child now was, another rising bank of power cells to draw upon for the creation of miracles. Not a shred of His personality or self-awareness remained; for all purposes, He had diedor had been transubstantiated, which was all the same now. His memories had been evaporated, and only the magnificent white brilliance of His power remained, condensed, purified, and made ready for use. For my use. It was now, after all, my power.
I had killed God, quite simply, just as I had killed Child some days before.
I felt no remorse.
Does one feel remorse when one shoots down a maniac who is wielding a gun in a crowded department store?
Man as God. I retained the mortal form and the mortal outlook, with the emotions and the prejudices of men. I did not think that would be a weakness, but that it might actually make me a more benevolent and stable deity than the previous owner of my power had been. Man as God
I vaporized the glittering metal analogues held in the fragments of mirror to my right. They disappeared without sound or light. I spread my hands, as in addressing the multitudes, and eliminated all the other pieces of that "cosmic mirror.
There was total darkness drawing down about me like an oiled curtain.
I made light.
With the light, I fashioned stairs leading upward into further regions of darkness.
I walked out of there, erasing the stairs behind me.
Outside, the world awaited me, unknowing but soon to learn
II
When I returned to my own body, carrying the power with me, the first thing I saw was Child's mutant shell convulsed with a series of hideous spasms that made it look much like the flickering, shape-changing image in a funhouse mirror. It sat straight up in bed, quivering like the shaft of an arrow. Its eyes were wide for the first time, the pulsing veins visible in the whites. Its slitted mouth worked furiously, though no words issued from it, no sounds at all. It scrabbled at its chest with two bony hands, clawed at its horrible face so viciously and persistently that blood seeped from the long red welts it carved in the flesh there.
The doctor attending the mutant grabbed it and attempted to force it backward onto the mattress, where restraining straps could be applied. But it heaved the white-smocked figure aside as if the man were so much paper, in an exhibition of strength that no one could have expected from such an emaciated body, from such skinny arms and powerless hands.
A dry rasping-hacking sound emanated from the creature's throat, but no words formed. It could have been tissue ripping under some unimaginable inward pressure rather than a conscious exercise of vocal cords.
"What's going on here?" Morsfagen demanded, rising from his chair with that slow, powerful, and somehow contemptible grace of his, cutting air like a sail.
The soldier named Larry came across the room, looking confused but determined. He dropped his rifle, and reached for the mutant. The creature snapped at him, sunk teeth into his wrist, and made blood fountain up brightly. The soldier screamed, struck at the mutant's face, smashed the jawbone. The mouth relaxed, released him, but the mutant was still awake, still struggled to gain control of itself and of the situation it found itself in.
"You did this!" Morsfagen roared, turning on me, pointing with a hand that trembled uncontrollably.
"No," I said quietly.
"You'll pay! Damn you, you'll see the woman raped for this, you'll see her humiliated!"
I could not even summon up the slightest bit of disgust for him. I looked with the eyes of the man I had been, but with the judgment of a god, and I could do no more than pity him. In a way, I resented my benevolence. I had longed for the power to strike back with thunder and with lightning. But now that the time had come, I found him deserving of scorn and pity more than wrathful vengeance.
"What is wrong with him?" he asked, shoving his broad face square into mine.
I knew exactly what was happening with Child's husk, though the rest of them could never possibly strike upon the truth. When I had left that shell, I had momentarily forgotten something which I should have remembered.
There was still one portion of Child's mind down there in the black waste of his body: the id. All those scorpion analogues which I had dispersed in the ice-floored subterranean cavern so long ago were now risen up and in command of the mutant flesh. Normally the most directly impotent of the mind's factions, it now reigned without control, without opposition. But the id alone was not a functioning consciousness and could never hope to control the body: the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome was a complete impossibility, something that could only exist in fiction. The mutant husk would die now, days after its mental expiration, with the scorpion-clawed id seeking control to gratify its sex lusts and its blood longings.
"Everyone grab him at once!" Morsfagen directed, leading the others in on the bed.
The mutant thrashed wildly, pitched from side to side of the bed. Finally, it grasped the rails and clambered against them, flung itself over the side. It crashed onto the floor with a sickening crunch of flimsy bones, biting at the air, spitting blood across the tiles, clawing and weakly kicking at anyone who tried to bend to it, or to give it assistance in its time of need. To the id, there was no such thing as a friend, and it acted accordingly.
Then it succumbed.
Quietly, like a sigh.
Motionless on the hospital floor, with smears of blood marking the space around it, it seemed more like a squashed insect than the ex-home of a human creature.
They stared at the corpse for a long while, transfixed, perhaps, by its inhumanness. Then Morsfagen turned to look at me with the malevolence I had once despised.
"You killed him," he said matter-of-factly, beyond hatred now. He turned to the soldier named Larry. "Arrest him. Get that bastard out of my sight!"
Larry lifted his gun, grinning. He enjoyed using it too much. As he advanced on me like a homicidal maniac, I began to think that even the mindless shell of the mutant had been more human that this boy. Behind those eyes, there was something a little less than a man.
"Stop where you are," I said.
But he did not, of course.
I reached out for him, touched him, took him. His face went utterly blank, and he ceased his advance.
"What the hell-" Morsfagen began.
With other esp fingers, I touched the minds of everyone in that room and delivered them into a state of sleep which was not quite sleep, closer to death but not quite death. There, they would be far out of my way so that I might concentrate on the work ahead. Cautiously, I entered their minds with an ability I had never had before: neither in scope nor in power. I spread out their lives, their neuroses and psychoses, and I carefully untangled the knots that had warped each man and woman's psyche over the years. When they woke, they would be emotionally and mentally stable for the first time. The old fears and worries would no longer plague them, and their personalities (which had been structured all their lives to nurture the needs which were produced by those fears and worries) would be drastically reshaped. But for the better, surely-for the better. I was God, and I could not make mistakes.