Meanwhile a green light started to ebb across the linked ectoplasm, as if cash were soaking in fabric solvent. We fell silent. She spoke. None of the goddess's faces looked at any of ours, but we could tell at once that this was a lone voice, a single speaker making an honest answer, rather than the group declamation of a star.
“A name —” But the loner gasped, and couldn’t go on.
“Revenge isn’t everything,” a second speaker moaned.
What? Those of us nearest the planet eyed each other, bewildered. What sort of final answer was that?
“A name,” the first managed, “will only get you so far.”
“Just try to be strong,” put in a third, weakly.
What were we hearing? Bubblegum sympathies. The cheapest kind of talk.
“If you make the effort,” said another of the goddess's people, “you’re bound to get somewhere eventually.”
At which, at last, we felt a break rip through our withered group. Our first deliberate break, our first act willful enough to be called adult. Though of course we had no idea how to take it at the time. We could be sure only of a heartsore rage at how these masters still tried to shrug us off. Our front ranks continued to clutch the wilting fragments of the planet, and at most we were puzzled to feel the sudden impossible room to move. Not till the screaming started did we begin to understand.
“Oh they’re all such big deals! All the Names. They’re such big, shiny deals!”
Another single voice. But not, we could see at once, from any part of the fogged-over evening star. By now those lay in a feeble green heap over their mute black core. So we nearest turned to look behind us, the lips of our wounds fluttering in the sudden roominess. We confronted ourselves. Ourselves, but this time not merely dropped out, lost, too sad. This time we faced revolt.
“Make the effort?” our rebels screamed. “We should make the effort?”
And merely by looking once more over these illfitted stones, their blood-smeared faces turning to surreal new national flags under the planet's green shine, we could understand what had them so enraged. Blood on every face, every face.
“Make the effort?”
One woman thrust out her chest, flaunting the crescent of welts where her breasts had been. She modeled for us in the starlight, the scars casting pale, horned shadows across her belly and neck. But then in mid-pose she was startled by a sob, by heavy tears, and she tumbled forward, she tottered back, folding at knees and waist and neck while repeatedly she slapped the word WHORE branded across her forehead. Others meanwhile showed off more of the same. The stumps of fingers, the stumps of tongues, the permanent ooze at the stump of an optic nerve at the center of a socket picked hollow. Farther up the line a man shook his penis viciously. We didn’t understand until the specks of broken glass started to sprinkle from the tip. Torture's leftovers: they’d forced a glass rod up his member and then worked it over with a mallet. We stared as the specks winked emerald an instant in the love-planet's dying glow and then… no, they didn’t “disappear.” No glimpse like that can ever disappear. Just the opposite. As we watched we knew that if we could ever again take up our chasing, the night's pretty latticework of symbols and forms would forever be dirtied by this cock's falling gristle. A nameless death immortal as a star that stood for a god.
We were shocked, we were desperate. We made the worst possible mistake. We began to argue with these ghosts. And:
“Don’t tell us we’ve got no choice!” The horrible thing about their screaming was that the only times we’d heard it before, we’d all been howling together at someone else. “It's the Names that don’t give us any choice. They’re just toying with us!”
But, we tried to say, the masters didn’t mean to —
“Masters? The last masters we had murdered us! These people are the enemy!”
But surely the truth had to come from them (here some of us jerked a thumb at the dismantled goddess behind our backs). Surely Truth itself was a hard slog, a prolonged evolution which, in time —
“Get out,” they said. “You’re starting to sound like Names yourselves.”
Already however it was they who were getting out. Already they’d dropped back so far that they began to lose themselves in the ruthless dark. We squinted, leaned forward from our threadbare ranks. But not one of us felt sure enough of his former soulmates to take a step in their direction. If they’d gone so far as to revolt, they were capable of anything. We strained our ears, but the last words came from a voice too well-hidden to place.
“If you get in our way again,” it said, “we’ll stop you once and for all.”
Understand then the raw universe that confronted us as, this last time, our remaining squad inched across the dark to discover who we were.
We didn’t know how our traitor comrades might stop us. We could only creep along wide awake, no longer chalk dust, now instead toughened to chalk. We let our fingers stretch and go webby like antennae, our eyes poke from our faces telescopically. So, full-grown and fully equipped at last, we few saw the limits of stars and sky. The universe, we saw, was a gourd. All these millenia of chasing, we’d merely rattled loose inside its hollow. A dustball inside a saddleback rind. Then we went frantic trying to doublecheck without dropping our guard. We threw a frightened glance behind us, and when had we ever imagined we’d care to look behind us? But there we only got worse proof of how little our travelling mattered. The love-planet, back there, was pulling herself together again. Tomorrow at sunset she’d rise again. The system remained unchangeable. And thus with our next inchlong forward sneak — realizing that even the fathomless black itself must be enclosed, that all was sealed in the universal rind — we saw that every one of our earlier dropouts must still be here. The hard logic of it made us click our joints together, terrified. Because between the speed of light and the ease of talk, every one of them must also have learned how little we’d come to. Still here and still travelsick, they’d seen us go on grinding against the night. They must hate us too.
Revolutionaries, dropouts, it made no difference. Every dark step here might turn up someone new to worry about. Every unlit fold might take us as implacably as the wrinkles snaking over a person's looks. Could we find no sanctuary?
We looked for help, as a final straw, among those shadowy newcomers who’d died with names. Those mica-chips against the black gravel, spatters of rain against our glassed-over eyes. We could see them quite clearly now. But all these new ghosts’ energies were given over to a crablike scramble for position. These sketchy apprentices clawed across the night's stick-figures; they pressed against each other with a terrible blind need to grow larger, to have the safety of numbers. And if one of the new dead found the least extra flyspeck of space for himself, his childish face would stretch in a machete grin.
The grip of enclosure, the grin of endless cold. Could we find no sanctuary? Then just here. . dead stop.
We’d pick up a low but unmistakable sound, a shuffle or scrabble in the dark nearby.
Dead stop. The one part of ourselves we allowed to move was our ears, which spread wide and turned outward like immense, rotating dishes. Nothing. Our nightscope eyes scanned, scanned. Nothing. But then a crack outfit doesn’t back away when the going gets a little complicated. A crack outfit doesn’t run scared. We kept up our alert. We did manage to tune in that low shuffle again, never mind how long it took, and a few additional web-fingered probes into the dark at last flushed out the kind of rocklike clump we’d been expecting. A stack of stones head-high, wide as my spread arms, and black.