Titans of Chaos

His eyes lit up with inhuman, godlike mirth. "Murderer? Me? Unmurderer, say rather, the onewho will make murder as impossible as a five-sided square! Has no one told you how simple, howperfect, how crystalline pure my plan of plans? I intend the cure!"

She said, "Cure for what?"

"For all! All people, all problems, all wants, fears, phobias, discontents, disorders, dissonance!

The panacea for the pancosmic all!"

"That's pretty large-scale thinking," Vanity admitted, not taking her eyes from him. "How?"

"I know what Saturn did; I know how to undo and redo his diddling. I thought my ladies told you:I told them to! I will kill you all and unmake the universe. Ah! What a misnomer that shall be: Forthere will be a second. The duo-verse shall be a universe as well, not merely existing, but being allthat exists, all that ever will exist, all that ever had existed. Your deaths will not merely beunmade, but will be made never-to-have-been! My mission as guide of souls, as Psychopomp, asguardian of life and death, will be fulfilled more gloriously, more perfectly, than can be described,for death itself I will abolish. My role as lord of magicians shall encompass a Great Work greaterthan all workers of the art: The alchemy of all nature shall be transcended-all of base materialnature be transmogrified to gold. Do you see? If you help me, I will resurrect you. You and allyour friends. The new universe will not have a law of life and death: Other laws will obtain. In thisworld we have life, and that is all: In that world we will have glory, something above and beyondlife!"

Vanity said, "What did Prometheus do?"

The soaring manic exultation seemed to seep from the face of Trismegistus. It was as if hestumbled across a stone while in mid-dash. In a voice suddenly cold and flat, he snapped: "What?

What question escaped the portcullis of your teeth?"

"What did Prometheus do to human beings? To make them half-divine?"

Trismegistus shrugged. "Who knows? Who cares? Am I not his greater?"

"Then how can you remake them, in your new universe? How can you remake us?"

His eyes narrowed in anger, but his voice blazed up again like flame, quick, light, gay: "Aha! Wehave a skeptic in our midst. I can end the war of Order and Madness by combining the best ofboth, establishing a harmony as Ouranos the all-creator should have done before time was born.