Then the syllables were only sounds with no phonetic relationship to language. The sounds degenerated into noises, and the noises became nothing more than a barely audible hum, like the unseen mechanisms of the universe toiling to maintain stasis in the scheme of things. He gave himself over to that hum, went up with it when it crested, down when it ebbed, like a piece of cork in the middle of some vast, lonely and uncharted sea.
"PERTOSPERTOSPERTOSPERTOS*:'.
The icy lips of the corpse's head brushed against his own lips. Their flesh seemed to stick together. And when they were separated, the idiot was sure his lips had been seared away.
"Tell old Pertos that you're sorry for what you did," a small, feminine voice ordered. "He came here after an apology from you. Come on now. Say it."
"Forgive* forgive them," he asked the head.
"Not us l" Her voice was shrill. Her good humor had abruptly become bitter anger. "You need his forgiveness!" But he could only repeat that which he had said. He only made them angrier.
They brought in the spiders and dropped them on him, one at a time. The tiny creatures crawled over his sweatslicked face, hung on his lips and drank beads of his saliva. They tentatively explored the caverns of his nostrils with furry legs.
Sebastian had no strength left to drive them away. Too, he no longer possessed the will to employ that strength even if he should find it in himself. Long ago he had come to understand that the spider from the Grande Theater in Springsun had boarded the truck somehow, that it was always with him and that it would punish him in a manner like this sooner or later. He suspected this was the "sooner" though time meant nothing to him, and he could not be certain.
A corpse kissed him again, demanded an apology, again through the interceding voice of a small woman. He repeated his request that the others be forgiven. The head was taken away.
Sebastian's hands were flat against the floor with the palms spread toward the ceiling. His arms were perpendicular to his shoulders, like the wings of a dead bird. They had tied his wrists to ringbolts in the floor. This must, at one time, have been a storeroom. The rings were for the security of precariously stacked goods. Now they served to hold a dying demi-god whose time to cease demi-godding had come. Where were the vultures that would eat out his liver?
On his right, one of the puppets drove a steak knife into the palm of his hand. Blood welled up and paddled there, dripped through his fingers, stained the floor.
To the left, another puppet followed this example.
The same was done to his feet.
Some of the servants of Bitty Belina had been in a play about a demi-god who was crucified in just such a manner by the governments he sought to destroy. They thought it made a nice touch.
Sebastian barely acknowledged the pain. He was not being stoic and playing the hero he had always wanted to be. No, it was a mere loss of sensitivity that enabled him to face the torture with such a subdued cry of agony. Deep in his mind, there was a part of him which said he could escape. Surely he could. These were pitiful creatures against which he was pitted, not a third his size. He could rise up in fury and rip loose his bonds. He could bring judgment upon them.
I created them, he thought. Pertos had them made and I was the one who brought them their final life. And now they have me tied here, beneath them.
He strained and managed to sit part way up. They hurried away from him, terrified. But it was not in him to rebel at these indignities, to once more walk among them. He was infinitely weary of them, even of the blond Belina.
He fell back. His skull bounced on the floor and brought on a wave of darkness.
He called to the old puppet master for help in this time of need. And then he fainted.
When he woke, the tarantula was perched in the center of his chest, moving warily as it listened to the thumping of his heart. Its black maw opened and closed, baring tiny, dark fangs that looked enormous from the idiot's queer vantage point.
He allowed it to scale his face without even shaking his head to dissuade it. Its feet were like the down on a duck's belly.
He passed out again, though more from exhaustion than from fear.
Later, they took a fifth knife and ran it into his side. They offered him urine for his thirst, which he refused.
Again, he considered escaping. He could leap up, tear free and stomp them to death as he had stomped the spiders not so long ago. And then, rather quietly and without any choruses of heavenly hosts or displays of divine wrath in the heayens, he died.
You know the rest.
The puppets were immune to all human diseases. Their flesh did not infect, nurture parasites or require long to heal. It did not split open with boils or sores. But for those who perished in battle or by accident, they were immortal. They did not age, champions over wrinkled flesh and senility.
The pace of their lives was frantic. They had no souls with which to appreciate the qualities of rest and solitude, of inactivity and quiet. They slept little, worked long, sought the pain that nourished them.
The immortality and the industry combined to make formidable warriors.
They copulated, made the women with children, just as real women would have borne the young. The Vonopoens had always said that the puppets were as like men as they could be made. This was but another proof. The children were even more fierce and relentless than their parents when it came to the pursuit of pleasure through the principal of pain. Many of the parents did not survive their young. Bitty Belina did. Wissa did. And but four others from the original thirty-seven.
The new generations were not satisfied with the games of pain they played among themselves. Now that the Furnace was dead, they had all the city to roam through. They made use of the long-dormant computer and the other facilities available to them. In. time, they forged weapons, learned war and set forth against an unprotected Earth where the cities were named things like Springsun, and Fallingwater and Novembermoon, where men had grown rich and soft and somewhat bored. It was a one-sided battle.
After Earth had been won, there were the stars. That took a while, for the puppets found much pain-pleasure on the motherworld to engage their interest for generations. Slowly, their stock of victims dwindled. In a century, they looked outward on blackness. And they went to it.
No race fought with such brutality as did the puppets. No race could stir in them the terror they stirred in others. Worlds were abandoned before them. Life rippled outward through the galactic clusters in an attempt to leave the puppets behind. But they always followed in faster ships with better weapons. War, to other races, was a game, at most a very serious contest of wills. To the puppets, however, war was existence, the purpose of being.
Perhaps even unto this day, the diminutive creatures might still be spilling through the void, tracking the shattered civilizations that fled from them. Fortunately, the Vonopoens had been able to create a special breed of warrior puppets with perfect fidelity to their masters. These were many-legged and many-armed spider beings who were turned loose on the puppets, drove them back, and finally crushed them completely.
The spider-lizards, the Vonopoens, had built the puppets and sold them to human beings. The puppets had risen against their human master by the use of spiders. Eventually, they were defeated by another breed of scrambling, black arachnids made of the flesh in the Furnace.
I wonder what the Rogue Saint Eclesian would have to say about such a chain of coincidences?
The Vonopoen artisan drops the Holistian Pearl. It rolls across the stone floor of his warren and comes to rest against a golden tapestry.
He stares at the white sphere a while, pondering the story it has told him. Then, shuffling hastily across the room to the shelf of books he keeps next to his drug bar, he takes down the Vonopoen Book of Wisdom which he has not read as much as he might wish, being more a man of the flesh than of the spirit. He turns to the gospels of the Rogue Saint, the only pages he has ever spent more than a few minutes with.
He skims the text, flips pages.
He finds what he searches for and reads it to himself as his stomach opens and closes on his belly, a sign that he has missed supper because of the Holistian Pearl's tale. Eclesian says:
"We Vonopoens have long prided ourselves on what we think of as our highest artform, our realistic miniature puppets. We make them in our own images and in the images of animals and other races, and we have them perform for us. Perhaps if we spent less time playing gods in this respect and examined the universe more closely, we would discover that we are all only puppets ourselves, on a much greater scale. We have our scripts. There are repetitious cycles. And somewhere, 1 think, there are voices that laugh at us. Even at me."
The Vonopoen artisan knows that Eclesian was ancient when that was written. Was, in fact, upon his deathbed. But he remembers the spiders and wonders. And wonders. For once, he is pleased that his own craft is something so simple and unimportant as weaving tapestries from stones and shells and setting them in vibration so they sing for a thousand years.
And then he goes to eat supper.