John Carmody could no more resist attacking than a hungry tiger who sees a goat tethered to a tree.
Light, light, light...
Ecstasy...
But not the hardening, setting-for-ever ecstasy of the others. This was threatening, frightening, for it exploded him, dissolved, sent him flying in a thousand bits outward.
Screaming silently, in mental anguish, he tried to collect the hundred thousand fragments, to bring them back, fused again into the image of the old John Carmody. The pain of destroying himself was unendurable.
Pain? It was the same as the ecstasy. How could pain and ecstasy be the same thing?
He didn’t know. All he did know was that he had recoiled from the six of Yess. Their lack of walls was their defense. Not for anything would he again attack them. Destroy John Carmody?
“Yes,” said Tand, though Carmody had not spoken. “You must die first; you must dissolve that image of the old John Carmody, and build a new image, a better one, just as the newly born Yess will be better than the old god who died.”
Abruptly, Carmody turned from both groups and reaching in his pocket, drew out the switchknife. His thumb pressed the button in the handle and the blade shot out like a blue-gray tongue, like the tongue of the snake that had bitten him.
There was but one way to get loose from the bronze jaws.
He did it.
It hurt, but not so badly as he thought it would. Nor did he bleed as much as he had expected. He mentally ordered the blood vessels to close. And they, like flowers at the approach of night, obeyed.
But the work of sawing through flesh and bone left him panting as if he’d run several kilometers. His legs trembled, and the faces below him blurred, and ran into two broad white featureless faces. He couldn’t last long.
The leader of the men of Algul stepped forward and held out his arms. “Jump, Carmody,” he called joyfully. “Jump! I will catch you; my arms are strong. Then we will scatter this weak, sniveling brood, and go to the temple and there—“
“Wait!”
The woman’s voice, coming from behind them, loud and commanding, yet at the same time musical, froze them.
He looked up, over the heads of the men.
Mary.
Mary, alive and whole again, as he had seen her before he emptied his gun into her face. Unchanged, except for one thing. Her belly was swollen enormously; it had grown since he had last seen her and was now ripe to give birth to the life within her.
The leader of the men of Algul said to Carmody, “Who is this Earth woman?”
Carmody, standing on the edge of the base, ready to leap down, hesitated and opened his mouth to reply. But Tand spoke first.
“She is his wife. He killed her upon Earth and fled here. But he created her the first night of the Sleep.”
“Ahhhh!”
The seven of Algul sucked in their breath and drew back.
Carmody blinked at them. Apparently, Tand’s information held implications he didn’t see.
“John,” she said, “it is no use your murdering me again and again. I always rise. I always will. And I am ready to bear the child you did not want; he will be here within the hour. At dawn.”
Quietly, but with a tremor in his voice that betrayed the great strain he felt, Tand said, “Well, Carmody, which shall it be?”
“Which?” said Carmody, sounding stupid even to himself.
“Yes,” said the leader of Algul, stepping back beneath the pedestal. “Which shall it be? Shall the baby be Yess or Algul?”
“So that is it!” said Carmody. “The economy of the Goddess, of Nature, of What- have-you. Why create a baby when one is at hand?”
“Yes,” said Mary loudly, her voice still musical but demanding, like a bronze bell. “John, you do not want our baby to be as you were, do you? A frozen dark soul? You do want him to be of heat and light, don’t you?”
“Man,” said Tand, “don’t you see that you have already chosen who the babe shall be? Don’t you know that she has no brain of her own, that what she says is what you think, really think and truly desire in the depths of your soul? Don’t you know that you are putting her words into her mouth, that her lips move as you direct them?”
Carmody almost fainted, but not from weakness and hunger of body.
Light, light, light... Fire, fire, fire... Let himself dissolve. Like the phoenix, he would rise again...
“Catch me, Tand,” he whispered.
“Jump,” said Tand, laughing loudly. A roar of laughter and of cries that sounded like hallelujahs burst from the men of Yess.
But the men of Algul shouted in alarm and began running away in all directions.
At the same time the dark purplish haze began to grow lighter, to turn pale violet. Then, suddenly, the ball of fire was above the horizon, and the violet light was white again, as if someone had yanked aside a veil.
And those of the men of Algul who were still in sight staggered, fell to the ground, and died in the midst of convulsions that threw them from side to side and that broke their bones. For a time they thrashed like chickens with their heads cut off, then, bloody- mouthed, lay still.
“Had you chosen otherwise,” said Tand, still embracing Carmody after his leap downward, “we would be lying in the dust of the street.”
They began walking toward the temple, forming a circle around Mary, who walked slowly and stopped now and then as the pains struck her. Carmody, walking behind her, gritted his teeth and moaned softly, for he too felt the pangs. He was not alone; the others were biting their lips and holding their hands tight upon their bellies.
“And what happens afterward to her—to it?” he whispered to Tand. He whispered because, even if he knew that this Mary-thing was not self-conscious, was really manipulated by his thoughts—and now by those of the others, too—he had become suddenly sensitive to the feelings of other people. He did not want to take a chance on hurting her, even if such a thing did not seem possible.
“Her work will be done when Yess is born,” said the Kareenan. “She will die. She is dying now, began dying when the Sleep ended. She is being kept alive by our combined energies and by the unconscious will of the infant within her. Let us hurry. Soon the Wakers will be coming from their vaults, not knowing if this time Yess or Algul won, not knowing if they must rejoice or weep. We must not leave them long in doubt, but must get to the Temple. There we will enter the holy chamber of the Great Mother, will lie in mystical love and procreation with Her, in that act that cannot be described but can only be experienced. The swollen body of this creation of your hate and your love will deliver the baby and will die. And then we must wash and wrap the baby and have him ready to show the adoring people.”
He squeezed Carmody’s hand affectionately, then tightened his grip as the pangs struck again. But Carmody did not feel the bone-squeezing strength because he was fighting his own pain, hot and hard in his own belly, rising and falling in waves, the terrible hurt and awful ecstasy of giving birth to divinity.
That pain was also the light and fire of himself still exploding and dissolving into a million pieces. But now there was no panic, only a joy he had never known in accepting this light and fire and in the sureness that he would at the end of this destruction be whole, be one as few men are.
Through this pain, this joy, this sureness was a lacing of determination that he would pay for what he had done. Not pay in the sense that he would forever be plunged into self-punishment, into gloom and remorse and self-hate. No, that was a sickness, that was not the healthy way to pay. He must make up for what he had been and had done. This universe, though it still ran like a hard cold machine and presented no really sweet- smiling face to mankind, this world could be changed.