It mewed, not angrily.
He turned.
It moved next to him, mewing.
“Go away, dammit!” he shouted.
It mewed, mewed, somehow crossing language barriers with the question it was asking — the question that still lurked somewhere in his own soul.
“Leave me!”
Mewing, water through a flute…
“There will be more gods,” he said, vomit suddenly touching the back of his throat. He threw up on the wall, leaned heavily against the gray metal. He gagged, cleared his throat. “There will be more rungs falling down the ladder now.” He was talking to a hundred ghosts, living and dead, to Gnossos, Hurkos, Buronto, Coro, Lotus, Crazy, all the dead people in the gore-splattered streets of Hope. They tumbled before him, insubstantial. “There will be more gods. But the ladder is structured like a pyramid, each rung smaller than the last, each god more provincial, less awesome. We’ll whip them, sooner or later. We’ll swat them like flies, those awful, ponderous universe-rulers. We are not property, damn it! We are not property! Dammit, dammit, dammit!”
The slug touched him, called sweetly in hissing tones.
“I am not yours,” Sam spit through tightened lips. He turned and staggered toward the hole again.
The slug followed.
At the hole, he turned to it, his face flushed with an anger that had suddenly become undirectable.
It mewed.
“Dammit!” he roared. “Dammit to hell — if there is a hell. Man is his own god. He has to be, if there was ever any purpose.” His mouth quivered, his eyes streamed tears. “And I am not your god!”
He fell through the hole and onto the grass. The slug did not follow.
In the city, the gutters were clogged with the flow of blood as it poured silently into the sewers. The stars were bright. The sky was without a roof. And darkness spoke to the wind.