The flesh in the furnace Read Free Page B

he was caught. But this guilty-it was worse. Much worse. It hurt.
        The winged angel lay in a nutrient bath himself, his lovely appendages draped across the edges of the pan. Behind closed eyelids, his eyeballs moved spasmodically. It was hard to let go of non-being and accept the role of life in all its facets.
        In the capsule-womb, the stepmother formed.
        Sebastian felt a kinship for her, knowing both were guilty. But her guilt, he realized, was much easier to take than his, for she knew what she had done. And he did not.
        He tried to remember the bleeding girl and the blood on his hand and the laughing and the screaming. But it hurt, and his eyes fogged, and his jaw went loose. He couldn't remember. He stopped trying, and he felt so much better that he resolved never to think of that memory again.
        He had made the same resolution hundreds of times before, though he never remembered it.
        At last, all the characters for the story of Bitty Belina were lined up in nutrient baths. Bitty Belina herself had sat up and was looking about at the dark room and the shapes of the puppet master and the idiot. Her eyes were very wide, and she kept brushing herself as if there were dust all over her, though that could not be.
        Pertos closed down the Furnace, deposited all the identity wafers in the file again and touched the Olmesclan amoeba in the proper rhythm, causing it to spread out over the Furnace like a film of water, until it was not visible. He turned around, looked at the puppets. His face was drawn, and his large eyes looked sick, like a man bearing too much of a burden.
        "Should I watch them?" Sebastian asked.
        "Yes," Pertos said. "I'll be in my room for an hour. Then we must be prepared for the show."
        Sebastian moved his stool closer to the puppets.
        Pertos gazed one last time around the room, then departed that place, the Holistian Pearl already in his hands. He walked the dark corridor to his room, went inside, closed the door and sank upon the couch there, utterly exhausted spiritually as well as physically. It was not that he minded playing God in the creation of the puppets. He thought of himself as nothing more than an operator of the Vonopoen devices. It was when the play was done and the small living creatures must be returned to lifeless, waiting liquid that made him miserable. To be a life-giving god leads only to pleasure. To deal death to those fragile creatures while they watched, aware of what was to be done to them, sapped a man's soul. The depression always set in upon creation, because creation could only lead to death again, later. He rolled the Pearl over and over in his fingers, seeking solace.
        
        The gray surface of the living jewel slowly responded to his caress, absorbing the body heat he offered, sucking up the energy of friction caused by the stone rolling across the microscopically ridged flesh. Its pale color seeped from it as whiteness flowed in. In moments, it was storing the energy to carry on its life functions, and a moment later he had given it more than it could hold. It used the incoming excess of energy to play its own role in this symbiosis. Through the nerves in the tips of his fingers, it flushed a distortion throughout his body, sent him into synathesia where all senses were confused, where sight came as smell and sound as pictures. The Pearl fired alien images in his brain, plunged him through the heart of a star and into even stranger places where it had been in its eternity of existence.
        The Pearl had had a thousand masters in its life to date, and now it drew on all their experiences, all the scenes and events it had shared while in their possession. It touched filaments of power along the surface of Pertos' brain, stepped up the vividness of the dreams and took him across the universe in the bodies of half a dozen races, in half a hundred strange spaceships, through half