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"I unbuttoned her shorts. She wriggled a little to help. I slid my hand under her panties. I was thinking that everything was information when I found myself clutching an erect penis.
"I whipped my head around. The blond was gri
"It was in that instant that I achieved enlightenment."
Something turned underfoot. Jane stumbled and, turning, saw that a hand sprouting from the roots of a nearby tree had seized her shoe.
She gasped and snatched her foot away.
The shoe fell free. The hand pushed it into a mouth that opened in the trunk and began to gnaw it down. Jane made no effort to regain the shoe, but hobbled after the unflappable Baldwy
"I don't understand!" she cried. "What does your story mean? Tell me what it means."
"But such things can only be explained by the Goddess," the Baldwy
"I thought there wasn't any such thing as the Goddess. I thought she was a metaphor."
"Most certainly the Goddess exists. I am taking you to her now."
A spray of cold babies' fingers brushed against Jane's cheek. She drew away and shuddered. But the trail grew narrower and the trees and bushes closer together. She was crowded and jostled by dark shapes, arms and shoulders bumping against her. There was a whiff of diesel exhaust and then the crowd, Baldwy
The people about her were silent, unspeaking. Heads down, they rapidly descended several flights of stairs. The only sound was the rush of clicking heels and scuffling soles. The graffiti on the dirty stone walls were oddly shaped and she couldn't read them. Overcoats and shoulder bags pressed against her from all sides.
The stairs turned and swept them past rows of chrome turnstiles that carded the crowd like wool. From the throats of the dark passages beyond came a roaring as of great machines or of rivers plunging down bottomless chasms. Beyond the landing, the stairs deposited her in a dim concourse. The crowd expanded to fill the larger space but did not slow. Everyone was silent, hurried, self-absorbed. "It's not far now," the Baldwy
Ahead, she saw a bright pool of light around which the crowd flowed and eddied without slowing. As she got closer she saw it was a child, a girl with red roses in her hair. The girl's skin was paler than marble, blanched and bloodless. Her features were exquisite, delicate without the least hint of weakness. She looked up at Jane with eyes the same harsh white as her skin, her dress, her hair. "You!" she cried.
"Me?" Jane stopped, bewildered. Nobody else paid the extraordinary creature the slightest attention. The crowds hurried by.
"You're so stupid!" said the little girl. "How can you be so stupid?"
"I—"
"You haven't understood a thing, have you?" She grabbed Jane's flight jacket and began going through the pockets. "What an idiot you are, what a total loss. You were the cause of Rooster's injuries—why did you dawdle so in Blugg's office? You screwed up Gwen and Peter when I meant you to be a comfort to them. You never even went to bed with Puck! You—I haven't the time to list your failures and treacheries. Where are the things I lent you?"
"What things?" Jane tried to back away, but the girl swarmed over her, a small fury, unstoppable. She ripped open Jane's blouse, reached a hand inside her chest, and pulled out a small leather fetish bag Jane hadn't known was there. She spilled the contents of the bag out on her hand. There was a mummified object about twice the length and thickness of a rabbit's foot, and a thin, bright glint of light.
Jane stared down on them. Her heart raced. Though she had never seen them before in her life, these two objects seemed to her the two most precious things in the universe.
"You wasted them!" The little girl held up the glint of light between thumb and forefinger, so Jane could see it for what it was: a needle. She dropped it back in the bag. She held up the larger object. It was covered with short, wiry hair: an amputated dog's tail. Angry teeth clicked. "I'll bet you don't even know what they were for!"
The dog's tail went in after the needle. Horribly white fingers closed about the bag, making a fist. "You weakling! You fool! You conceited, self-centered prig!" With every name, the girl hit Jane in the chest. The blood-red roses rattled with each blow. Finally, sneering disdainfully, the child turned her back. The crowds closed about her, and when they opened again, she was gone.
Jane blinked. She pulled shut and rebuttoned her blouse. Then she zipped up her jacket. She stood at an intersection. The concourse stretched far and indistinct in all directions.
In sudden panic, she realized that the Baldwy
Her guide was gone.
In a gray haze of despair, Jane wandered by signs reading Bar-B-Q Beef, Discount Vitamins, Deli-Sandwiches, Shoe Repair, Dollar Expres$, Jewelry, and Chinese Fast Wok. Flatly she thought, this is it, then. A pointless wandering through eternity. It was a singularly bland doom and yet one that felt oddly appropriate.
Just as she thought this, though, she chanced to glance within a diner and saw the Baldwy
At her approach, he put down his doughnut on his plate. Dabbed at his thin lips with his napkin. Smiled politely. "Here you are."
"Yes," she said. "But where am I?"
"In the same place you ever were; only your perception of it has shifted." The Baldwy
He led her behind the counter and opened what she had taken to be the door to a broom closet. They went through.
They were in a room, she supposed. Or a space of some kind, or possibly no space at all. It was impossible to tell, for all her attention was sucked up and swallowed by what was before her.
She stood before the Black Stone.
It was enormous, three times higher than herself at a minimum. But as there was nothing to gauge its scale against, it might have been any size, larger than worlds, greater than stars. Its surface was smooth and irregular, almost glassy in places, pitted and whorled like that of a meteorite. Mostly, though, it was black and solid and real. Jane had no doubt whatsoever that it was the Goddess incarnate.
"You may ask anything you want," the Baldwy
Jane looked up at the Black Stone. For a long time she did not speak. Then she cleared her throat and asked, "Why?"
There was no answer.
"Why?" she said again. "Why is life so loathsome? Why is there pain? Why does pain hurt so much? Couldn't you have ordered things differently? Or did you have no more choice than we? Is there no such thing as choice? Are we nothing more than automatons? Why is there love? Did you create us merely so we could be punished? Why are we punished? What was our sin? How could a mother treat her own children so? Don't you love us? Do you hate us? Are we aspects of you? Are you so hungry for sensation that you incarnate bits of yourself as us in order to experience ignorance, fear, and pain? Is omniscience that bad? What is death? What becomes of us after death? Do we simply cease to be? Do mortals have only the one life? Were there other lives before this one? Did we do something unforgivable in them? Is that why you hate us? Will there be more lives? Will they be worse? Can even you die? If you hate us so much, why is there beauty? Does our misery rely on it? Would we be happier without beauty? Why is there joy? Exactly what do you want?"