Otherwise, why would you worship me?
I departed from the minds in the room, though I did not summon anyone back to consciousness. I did not need their help to command the tides and to grow storms in the heavens-nor for the much broader changes I wished to bring about in the world.
I settled down to bringing a new face to the Earth, enjoying every moment of my godhood-perhaps too well
III
And there, in that hospital room in the upper floors of the Artificial Creation complex, with the dead and bleeding mutant form before me, I knew the greatest triumphs of my entire life. I ranged far from those white walls, though I never once rose from the chair in which I sat. I flew over seas and continents without benefit of a bodywithout even an analogue form-to contain my psychic energies. Miracles were within my grasp now, and though I did not change any water into wine or raise any men from the dead, I did other things, yes, other things
The first order of business, so far as I was concerned, was to reach downward through the floors of the great structure and locate that place where I had been born, where plastic womb had contained me and where wired uterus had spit me out. It was no sentimental journey, no longing for a return to those cold mother walls, but the bitter-sweet taste of a deeply abiding vengeance.
I sent my awareness drifting down through the layers of the huge building, through plaster and lath, plastic and steel, through electrical conduits and wads of fluffy insulating material. I passed the radiating awareness of other human beings, but did not stop to handle them just yet, bent on the confrontation I had dreamed of for years.
Oedipal?
Not exactly. I did not want to kill my father and marry my mother, merely to kill my mother and be free. Certainly, there was a quality of love in it too, but that was easily overlooked.
I found the lowest two floors, where the paraphernalia of the genetic engineers cored the walls like fungus, filaments threaded through the plaster like disease worms.
Machines descended from the ceilings of the rooms, thrust upward from the floors. There were blocks of data processing computers, memory banks and calculating components which handled everything from temperature regulation to DNA-RNA balance in the chemical sperm and egg.
Along the walls and on various raised platforms around the floor there were programming keyboards for the men and women who maintained the delicacy of the computers' decisions.
In every great chamber, the center of attention was the womb itself. It was contained in a large, square glass tank whose exterior walls were more than three inches thick.
Between these outer petitions and the meat of the nut, there were thinner layers of grass along with fiberglass wads of insulation. In the center were the nonconductive plastic walls, cored with the miles of wires reporting conditions back to the computers. There were electrode nubbins there by the tens of thousands, and waldoes so minuscule as to be unbelievable were doing impossibly tiny things to impossibly tiny creations, spheres of cells not yet remotely shaped like human beings.
Mother
The womb, darkness, quietude, thrumming pulse of hidden works felt more than heard
There were more than eighty technicians and medical attendants clustered in the rooms of the genetic engineering equipment, all of them busy. I reached out with my godly esp and took control of every one of their minds.
Work ceased; conversation broke off in midsentence. I directed them out of that place, upward through the building to regions of safety.
I surveyed the place as a sense of power stirred in me the like of which I had never experienced before. It was not the magnitude of the feeling, but the quality which made it so different. For the first time, I understood my godhood in a personal sense, understood that revenge was possible on a scale that I had never before comprehended.
I had not been able to release that pent-up vengeance on a man, like Morsfagen, because pity had outweighed anger.
But I could never pity a machine, a thing without feelings.
I realized that my vengeance would always have to be directed against ideas and things and constructions borne of those ideas rather than against men; all men were pitiable in their stupid blindness to fact, but the creations of that stupidity, the ideas and ideals based on that stupidity deserved nothing but loathing and condemnation.
For a moment, I had the fleeting thought that this sense of power over the artificial wombs was much like the sense of power which the young guard at the Tombs had experienced in his fantasies about slaughtering his parents in their bed. Like him, I was rising up against the most fundamental loyalty of my life, against the salty seed and the warm womb which had engendered me (albeit, with the aid of some eighty technicians and physicians and computer programmers). But I thrust that notion down and got on with the job at hand.
I raised my figurative ax over my mother's symbolic head and savored the destruction I was about to wreak
Did Jesus think of striking Mary down? Hardly. But I had given up that vision of God. I was another sort altogether.
I split open the surfaces of the walls and peeled back the plastic and the plaster, revealed the snaking conduits and the tangled ganglion of wires. I grasped these nerves gleefully and tore them free of the womb structures, sent the complex mechanisms into shuddering, heavy spasms of mechanical terror and confusion, into wrenching machine agony that drew smoke rather than blood or tears.
Moving swiftly, almost maniacally, I wrenched the programming keyboards loose of their connections and smashed them repeatedly into the floor.
The wombs were no longer connected to a brain to tell them what to do with themselves.
Smoke rose from the blocks of data-processing equipment, and tapes whined senselessly through the memory banks, seeking answers that could not be found.
There was but one answer, and that answer was God, and that God was me
I shattered the glass outer walls of all the wombs, The floor was littered with fragments of sharp, bright, and bloodless flesh.
I broke inward, reached the heart of each warm, dark chamber, and shredded the slowly forming germ cells, squashed them.
I destroyed the wombs from inside, working back toward the shattered outer walls until there was nothing left but powder and fumes.
It must have looked singularly strange in that place: invisible hands making havoc in the center of that technological wonder; explosions without origin; plastic dribbling down and lying in cooling puddles on the floor; smoke rising everywhere It must have looked as if Nature had risen up in fury to dispose of such a blasphemous and pretentious project as this last folly of man's.
In essence, that was exactly what had happened.
Mother was dead.
And she was disfigured.
I had never had a father.
I left that place of smoldering memories, of twisted plastic and running wires, jellied tubes and transistors, returned to the hospital room where my body sat in the same chair where I had left it. Morsfagen and the others remained in a state of suspended animation, offering no resistance.
In a few moments, I had made all the necessary decisions; I knew what had to be done next. I had decided everything with the speed and the thoroughness of a super-computer, my thought processes racing faster and faster as the godly power within me became further integrated with my own mind. And I knew there were no flaws in my plans.