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light, past photographs of any person?
Robina, the patchwork being said, you ve just got to help me out.
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Converts
Help you out? It s me who s hallucinating!
Curiously, Robina did not feel afraid. It seemed as though the harlequin was
draining her fear away;
draining away, at the same time, her fear of madness &
Now the harlequin wore the faces of Silvester, Pan and Nixy.
No, you aren t hallucinating. This is the Past you are seeing. It is the
other
Past.
Other & past? But surely there s only one past?
The brown-skinned people were erecting a city on the plain. None of the houses
had any doors, but only open archways. Sometimes people paused to copulate
openly in the streets. It was a city without any interest in privacy.
Actually, Robina, there would appear to be two
Pasts. Two branches from the same stem, two trunks from the same root. Oh, I d
begun to suspect this over the past ten thousand years or so! But I let things
ride. I
don t know that I had much choice in the matter. Maybe it even amused me!
Maybe I thought I d learn something more about myself. And now look at the fix
I m in!
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A nomad invasion swept across the plain. This forced the brown people of the
city to invent weapons and tactics, and to build a city wall with massive
gates. Yet though many heroes died in the skirmishes outside those gates,
though there was blood and fear and pain, also there was a curious sense of
ballet, or game, about the unfolding war. This history was a chess game played
with living knights and pawns.
Weapons clashed around her. Some of the protagonists were altering their
bodily shapes to those of beasts and monsters. They became demons, marvels
with wild talents, wild emotions embodied in flesh and bone, in claw and
feather. She saw griffins and ogres, harpies, angels and centaurs. These
pranced and flew and trampled till Beauty and Good had defeated Evil and
Ugliness, for the time being at any rate.
Robina saw nothing in the city resembling a temple, church or shrine. No
prayers were offered up, no sacrifices &
You ve been nuts on God for such ages! Yet you never worked out what a God
is. Always on the lookout for something supernatural! The harlequin sighed.
I don t suppose I can blame you. I only made the connection, myself, in the
last three thousand years.
Are you saying you know what God is? But I don t think I believe in God.
A very commendable attitude. But, baby, I
am
God. At least, I m part of God. And God is you
. Yes, you:
the whole damn lot of you! You, as you might have been. But were not.
Now you listen to me, Robina Weber. Hear this: there were two possible paths
for the evolution of higher
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Converts intelligence on this world. One was your own path which was the
construction of a personal self, sustained by the reality-machines of your
separate minds. And there was our path: the path of collective awareness,
arising from the empathy of the primal horde.
Thatlatter is God. Once it has a chance to grow, and play games with itself,
and learn. God is the human mind raised to the power of the whole human race.
Its evolution leads to Godly powers. It brings command over our own bodies,
and command over our minds, linked in the Overself.
The city had become steel and glass. What looked like alien beings rubbed
shoulders with the human inhabitants. Yet they were all, Robina sensed, from
the same root stock. The aliens were weirdly mutated not by genetic trial
and error, but by willed intention.
Outside the city, rested a silver space vehicle in the shape of an egg. It was
the size of a baseball stadium.
Plainly this vehicle wasn t propelled by rockets. Control of gravity, or of
the continuum itself, must power it. Hovercraft with transparent domes were
bearing alien beings to board it. Strange air writhed in these domes,
poisonous fumes. Mythological beings supervised the loading.
We re sending part of ourself away from the Earth, the harlequin commented.
We want to see whether we will split over interstellar distances like an
amoeba, thus giving birth to ourself once more. It s an experiment.
We may discover other alien Gods like ourself out there already. It wouldn t
surprise us. Perhaps we ll learn how to unite with them in Godly marriage.
Perhaps a conflict game will develop; maybe that will be a better way to learn
and grow. Sometimes I think that the universe is one big game. Some future
version of me is playing the game with myself. In a sense, I may still be a
child-God &
And when the game has been played out, when at last I understand the
universe, I can start it off all over again with a few changes in the rules &
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But
& It seems the universe is a bit stranger than this. Though I ve been
suspecting it for a while. And that brings me back to you, Robina.
The harlequin grimaced. Its face was all the faces of the first tribe of the
Farm, in turn.
You can t be God, said Robina. Not if you don t know everything!
I m the next best thing, my dear. Nearer my God! than thee. And the true
name of this God is
Pansapiens
&
Pansapiens evolved naturally in our time-stream. Alas, either the universe or
I myself would seem to have given rise to an echo, to a mirror reality where I
didn t arise at all. Shall we call that echo the Path of
Self? It seems to balance the Other Path just as an antimatter cosmos may
balance the matter cosmos.
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It s a sort of particle pair production, if you re fond of physics &
There s resonance between these two streams, Robina. Because of this
resonance, you people on the Path of Self have called up aspects of me, time
and again. Not that it ever interfered with me directly, before!
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