A god is not plagued with doubt.
I divorced my mind from my body again, and sought out of the AC complex, across vast stretches of land toward the minds of other men, where I would begin to build the new world. I found the members of the junta, one by one, and altered their minds. I rooted deeply, found their personality problems and removed them. I gave them the best psychotherapy man had ever imagined, and left them without a desire to rule.
Then; in each man's mind, I planted the desire for a return to elective government, and left them as their own counter-revolutionaries.
Next, I began a methodical search of the corners of the world; I radiated a growing, toughening web of power that sought out the minds of every leader in every nation, down through the lowest bureaucratic posts. I cleared those minds of power-hunger, of sexual frustration turned into violence. I healed them like a prophet with the power of god in his hands, and I left them better men.
Not satisfied yet, I struck downward and located — all the men with the potential of leadership, even though they were not yet in positions to guide the destinies of their fellow citizens. I cleaned house in every psyche, helped all of them to learn to cope with existence and with their own place in the scheme of things.
And still my power grew. Or, perhaps, the more I used it, the better my manipulatory mechanisms became.
Next, I found the stockpiles of nuclear weapons hidden in all corners of the globe. I turned the fissionable material into lead by making Time flow a million times faster around the vicinity of the weapons. In the biochemical warfare laboratories, I destroyed all the mutant strains of death that scientists had generated. I opened the minds of those same scientists and cleansed them, made them reject the need to create death in order to feel worthy and powerful.
And the day wore on.
And evening came.
Still, I toiled.
It was somewhere beyond midnight when I finished reshaping the world and returned to my body in the AC complex. With all that I had done, I still felt energetic.
None of my vitality had been sapped; it even seemed to have been magnified. The power I wielded was now more complex and enormous than I could ever have imagined.
I stretched my esp out and lingered along the surface of the moon, looking firsthand at the craters with eyes I constructed from the cold vacuum of space.
Stars winked close at hand, warm and yet freezing, pricks of light, yet mammoth stars.
I sped outward to them.
I touched red giants and white dwarfs, plummeted through the center of a sun, listening to the songs of exploding hydrogen, to the creation of matter, and to its instant destruction-or, rather, to its instant conversion into light and heat.
Energy
I seemed to gain energy from every source I approached.
My own light was brighter than that from any star, and was controlled far more intricately, making it more deadly and more important than countless suns in mindless eruption.
I passed outward beyond the galaxy.
I reached the end of the universe, sped through impenetrable walls of pearl gray, kept on going through dimensions until I reached another plane of creation.
And then I came back, skipping from galaxy to galaxythen from star to star-then from planet to planet, finally back into the room where my mortal shell sat stupidly.
I rose up from the chair and left that room after turning Morsfagen and the others loose. I walked down the corridor and found Melinda's rooms, opened the door without touching it, and walked inside. I could have come to her with my mind, but I wanted the personal touch of flesh on flesh for this last and ultimate step of the plan.
"You're free," I said as she turned from her window and looked at me, grinning her beautiful grin.
She started toward me
And then I was to learn just how lonesome and awful the role of a god can be. I was about to meet with my first near-disaster since I had claimed the power
IV
We were strangers.
We had made love and been in love, had shared secrets and dreams. I had risked my life for her, and she had done the same for me, though in a different manner.
And yet, I did not know her. She seemed like a crippled doll, speaking with the voice of some hidden puppet-master who was a terrible craftsman and who was even worse at writing dialogue for his wooden creatures to perform on stage.
Everything she said seemed witless and stupid andperhaps most unforgivably of all-utterly boring. I could not understand how such, a woman could ever have interested me, even for the brief moments of lovemaking.
Surely I had never been so anxious for the feel and taste of flesh that I had wooed and taken this creature in my arms! That seemed, now, like nothing more than animalloving-bestiality.
In my arms, she was a pet
And nothing more.
Yet I knew what she had once been, and I understood that she could again be important to me. I was certain, all at once, that all that was required was a change of her personality, a growing up. I put her into the same suspended animation I had used with others, delved into her mind with my omnipotence and straightened out the quirks there, brought her swiftly to her full human potential.
I woke her.
And I sorrowed.
Her full human potential was not enough.
She was strikingly beautiful, filled with a sensuality that made my loins stir, that would make any man sit up and take full notice of her. She was the essence of femininity, full-breasted, round-hipped, and long-legged, with honey hair and wide eyes, Ml lips and quick pink tongue. But she was no more than that to me. Even a beautiful woman who outshines all other females is of no interest if her mind seems as sawdust and her words strike you as the rambling proclamations of an idiot.
And so she seemed to me: an idiot, a thing, a moving construct of flesh. But not a woman I loved.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"Nothing," I said. It pained me even to be forced to speak. Couldn't she understand me, without verbalizations? Couldn't she eke out even a hint of my thoughts without my having to spell them out for her in clean, crisp words and phrases?
"Something is," she said.
"Nothing."
"You're so distant. I can't tell if you're really there or not."
Oh, God, oh, God, I moaned to myself. But there was no use in that. It didn't help to pray to myself.
"It's as if," she said, "it's not you inside there. Maybe Child has taken over. Maybe just a little part of nun has."
"No," I said.
"But if Child had taken you over, he would make you say that to satisfy me, wouldn't he?"
I said nothing.
"So maybe that's it."
"No."
I was very weary, very old.
"Something, anyway," she said.
"Yes. Something."
"I haven't asked you how you got here? How did you shake the cops?" She was smiling through all of this, though her face belied her true feelings beyond those brightly flashing teeth.
I did not answer her. I merely looked at her with a deep and melancholy sense of loss. And with a fear of the future that was to be mine from this day forth.
I saw, now, why God had eventually lost all touch with reality, had stepped across the thin red line into utter madness. He had begun as a super-intelligent creature able to set the precarious movements of the universe in perfect harmony, able to structure the balance of all creation. But as time had passed, He grew introverted because of His lack of company. There was no one worthy of Him, equal to Him, and He had stagnated with this lack of personal conflict and motivations.
The same would happen to me in time. It might require millennia, but it would happen all the same. Some day, I would whirl across the universe from one dark point to the other, insane, and babbling, my manipulatory mechanisms unable to harness the great psychic energy inside of me.