Why, Lord? Why now? I already repented what I’d done. I already resolved to undo it. I came here to make good on that promise.
Why now, at the threshold of my redemption, when I am finally ready to do something truly good and pure for the world, when I am ready to serve the natural order instead of my own desires…
Why now would you deliver me into the hands of the one person, perhaps the only person in the world, with both the will and the means to actually kill me?
“Such kind words,” Lilith said. “I never hear such things anymore. I made my servants to serve, not to love. Perhaps that will be my next great endeavor. To conquer more than the flesh, and more than the will. To conquer the spirit itself. To enslave the heart.”
“And then?” Omar’s voice cracked and he paused to master himself. “What then? When you’ve enslaved all the world, bent it to your every whim and desire, tasted everything that this world has to offer, and everything that you can create, what then? Whether it takes fifty years or five thousand, what then?”
Lilith laughed. “You see, this is the problem with you religious people. You’re looking for something nobler, something deeper, something that can elevate your little lives, something to give your lives meaning, because you’ve failed to find any meaning for yourselves. Even you, Bashir, after all these millennia, even you have failed to find your own meaning for your sad, empty existence.”
“And what meaning have you found?”
“There is no meaning!” Lilith stood up and strode to the side of his table. “A moment ago you spoke of tasting everything in the world. Well, I have tasted much of what this world has to offer. I have placed the hot and cold flesh of countless plants and animals in my mouth, and devoured them. I have felt indescribable joys in my mouth, and in my belly, again and again. And I wish to go on tasting and devouring them over and over again, and whatever else I can discover in this world.”
“Is that all?” Omar looked at her, but saw nothing. There was a face of course, a familiar face with dark eyes and full lips and long lashes, all framed in dark hair and bright jewels, but he had seen all of these before. There was nothing new, nothing worthwhile to see in her now.
“All? It’s everything. And sex! Glorious sex! You remember sex, don’t you, Bashir? You rode me once, when I was mortal and fragile, when I was so proud of what I could do for a man,” she said. “But now, I can look back on those days and see what a child I was. The pleasures of the flesh are without number, without measure. There are entire books, entire schools across this wondrous world devoted to the study of pleasure, and I have studied them all. I have built their toys and worn their costumes, but I have done so much more. I have created new lovers, creatures far more sensual than any man or woman, creatures that can ravish me for hours and days. They serve my every desire, bring to life my every fantasy, and bring me to new heights of ecstasy the likes of which no man or woman has ever experienced. I have ridden such creatures to death many times.”
“Is that all?” he whispered.
She leaned away. “You’re such a fool. God. Heaven. Souls. Death. The meaning of life. The meaning of the universe. Why do you think such things even exist? We are human. We are flesh. We eat, and we rut. You think you are something better than a worm because you are capable of thinking such a thing, but you’re wrong. There isn’t anything more to this world, to this life, to this existence. This is all we are. Creatures. Simple creatures, all enslaved and bound to follow the same natural laws. Survive. Reproduce. Even you in all your brave inventions with your immortality, you’ve done nothing more than find a new way to play the game, still following the same rules. We all want to go on living. That’s all. The sage and the idiot, the warrior and the leper, all want to live. They eat and rut and die. The only difference between them, and us, and the worms is this.” She held up the sun-steel pendant hanging around her neck.
Omar shook his head. “There is so much more to life.”
“Yes, of course there is,” she said gently. “There’s pain and fear, and ten thousand other words for pain and fear. There is horror and terror, frustration, misery, depression, self-loathing, confusion, bewilderment, hatred, sorrow, and on and on. But why dwell on that if you don’t have to? I don’t. I dwell in joy. I explore joy. I create joy. And yes, I am quite selfish with my joy, but the world is young and I’m not getting any older. Perhaps one day I will share my joy with the world. Perhaps one day every man and woman in every nation will experience the pleasures that I now luxuriate in.”
“I shudder to think.” Omar closed his eyes for a long moment, and then opened them again to narrow slits.
“Why?” She leaned down and folded her arms on the table and rested her chin on her arms right in front of his face. “What is it about happiness that so frightens you?”
Omar said nothing.
I believe she’s wrong, but I can’t say why. How can I? How do I explain to her that my faith is something better, when I have nothing to show for it, and she has so much to show for her lusts?
“No answer?” Lilith’s voice was soft and gentle, a graceful sound that verged on the musical, as though she’d rather be singing than speaking. There was no anger in her now, no sharpness or hardness. This was her world, and she was in control, without fear. “Tell me about your noble life, Bashir. I know that you’ve spent four thousand years traveling the world, making people immortal and asking them to learn things for you. But I want to know what it has all added up to. Have you found happiness? Have you built great works? Have you transformed the world to better fit your wills and desires and visions?”
He swallowed. “No.”
“Tell me.”
Omar swallowed again and looked at her. The face that gazed back at him was calm and lovely, young and full of innocent expectation, awaiting his answer, any answer, without judgment. He said, “I have destroyed nations, and cultures. I have killed thousands, both with my own hands and through my actions. I have caused plagues and fires, famines and floods. I have driven men and women mad. I have turned the virtuous into the depraved. I’ve made princes into monsters, and lovers into traitors. I have built two great houses dedicated to death and greed, and filled them with killers and slavers. And so much more than I can scarcely stand to think it, much less say it. And the worst part of it all… is that I never knew what I was doing.”
She nodded slowly, still no trace of emotion on her face except curiosity and patience. “I’ve killed, too. Not thousands, I don’t think. Hundreds, more likely. But one at a time. Never by plague or madness or anything that you described. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have lived a life such as yours.”
He turned his face toward the ceiling. “Don’t pity me. Don’t you dare. Not you. Not here. I can’t…” He closed his eyes again and focused on the feeling of the air sweeping in and out of his lungs, on the soft pounding of his heart, on anything other than the woman staring at him.
“Why not me? Why not here?” she asked.
“You’ve imprisoned me in a tomb deep in the earth and turned my arm into that hideous, disgusting thing.” He coughed and squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to let the tears escape again.
“Is that all?”
Pain exploded through Omar’s right arm and he snapped his head over to see Lilith slicing into his beetle-arm with a slender knife. As he gasped, she reached inside the black armored limb with her bare fingers and yanked out a tiny sliver of gold, which she tossed onto another, smaller table behind her.
Then she leaned forward again on the edge of his table, her chin on her bloody palm and a look of utter serenity in her eyes. “Better?”
Omar stared at his deformed, inhuman arm with its violent gash and splash of blood, and within four or five heartbeats it was smooth brown skin and hair and nails again, just as it always had been. The foul sensation of being a soft bundle of nerves inside a chitin shell evaporated and he once again felt solid and whole. He flexed his fingers one by one and felt his nails scratching lightly on his palm. The knife wound was already gone, already healed, already closed and forgotten without leaving the faintest mark.