LIKE MERCURY, HE MOVED ...the man in the snake mask. The dancer, lonely dancer, at the center of a ring of Fire-Children. As the acid entered Salamander's brain the desert changed; ferns, then trees, sprang from the parched soil as the sacred chalice touched his lips. It was burning, stinging; acid, not LSD. Acid, another acid, in an alternate world: Acid contains light! the High Priest of the Mystery Cult intoned deeply, and it was the truth: The drug was crystalline fire, a burning, searing heat which ignited the brain, dissolved the nervous system.... Farber saw as a disembodied observer, an entity whose awareness was once more absorbed by the Other, not wishing to participate in this prostitution of drugs by a cult, yet propelled like by Salamander's addiction....Farber was especially distressed as a scientist who believed that psychedelics belonged in the hands of responsible researchers--but with the death of his real body he was lost completely to the cravings of Salamander's addiction.... Rest in peace, Farber... Rest in Eternal Peace; the Salamander lives on the desert in this heat, this night.... The transparent pyramid city was now covered with clinging vines and moss...Salamander looked at himself, saw his flesh crawling, changing colors like the living, vegetable Phoenix: His fingers became talons, scales grew along his back, his head bobbed rhythmically and his tongue flicked through the air, guided by some animal instinct he could not control: He was a lizard-thing. It seemed a million years that he frolicked in that green world before the sun grew hot. The forest died; the soil dried and cracked; volcanoes and geysers erupted sending steam and sulfur into the air. All around him other lizards dehydrated, slowly turning into fossils. The survivors sought the cool air of the mountain heights or the unearthly quiet of the caves. A few replaced their limbs with thick, armored skin and fins to adapt to the hot mineral waters that flowed beneath the ground. Fissures opened up beside Salamander. Decaying cadavers were piled up in the space around them. Clutching tentacles reached from the earth, dragging the dead things inwards. Salamander curled up like a fetus, but he could not hide from the Spirit of Gravity: It dragged him to the brink of the abyss before he broke free, running insanely as the reeds and drums played their hypnotic cadences, scattering the Fire-Children in their intricate masks...death-masks. He ran through the city gates: The white pearl was the teeth of some antedeluvian carnivore; the mouth of the city gate swallowed him. He ran for hours; ran through metal, crystal, and stone labyrinths. Each fork of the labyrinth was one of an infinite number of possible paths--he moved through all of them at once. The paths converged abruptly upon a woman. Her face shifted, features subtly changing: She took on the forms of many women. As he reached out to touch Night an infinite depth was revealed within her. He penetrated her, thrust deeply into... Nothingness...then the pleasures of all who made love, experienced all at once. Some of them were married and some of them were whores yet he felt neither a child's love nor a man's lust, but something that was both less and more than either.... ...falling inside her; feeling her tighten; he saw, with every intimate caress of Darkness, the whole world making love to its mother, Shadow. And her makeup was the violet, the violence of twilight. Whore-mother with a consuming mouth. Then he fell to Earth, to a plane of glass in a pyramid of cities above cities, desolate like the whore who had abandoned him...he wandered alone in the crystal city, a lizard and not a man.... He saw himself reflected in a window, but the reflection was not inverted, as in a mirror. Besides himself there was the whole world: the tangled jungles of Africa and the numberless dunes of the Sahara; the steaming rice paddies of China and the geothermally maintained colonies of Antarctica; the high castles of Europe and the pyramids of the Aztec Empire; the teeming multitudes of fish in the ocean; the gnomes at work in their mines and otherworldly creatures of flame living in the solar atmosphere; he saw the seven planets and realized that like alchemy, Ptolemaic astronomy had never been overturned in this dimension...then he saw beyond the planetary spheres with all their epicycles; looked on the face of the Unmoved Mover and died in its numinous light. Stars and galaxies of which world he did not know became the glittering lights of cities beneath the Earth as he was cast into the kaleidoscope again, was moving through subterranean corridors of metal where the engines worked untiringly and a colossus of light towered above him, the city at night.... The darkness which pursued him, the shadow, became Ravens; the multiple images like forms stacked on a holographic plate became a single demon-thing: still trajectories converged on the creature. He fled from it, from the darkness within him, clambering across tanks, scurrying along catwalks.... # EVEN CRYSTALLOGERS GET THE BLUES "...and that's the story," Sophie said, glad of a chance to be rid of the stupid wig; it itched; and the sunglasses: They dimmed everything, dulled the world to shadow and blurs; made her look like some expensive whore. The shades were pulled to keep out prying Raven eyes. Miriam Benjamin looked pensive; looked more like the real lover of Farber than the Queen of Phoenix, Diana's cyborg twin. Perhaps some of that love reached out from a different world to touch her now as she joined in the mad scheme of rebellion: "So in other words, we must employ Crystallogical divination with my Philosopher's Stone to learn Farber's whereabouts?" Sophie still felt somehow detached from this strange world of Stones...but the shadows were deep, contained worlds--perhaps with psi of her own she knew that Farber was being sacrificed to Night for some unspeakable sin which had been old when the world was young. She saw into past lifetimes; knew the slow, moving currents of Fate which directed reincarnation.... Ben went to her safe, fetched a treasure greater than gold: a divining sphere made of purest saffron Philosopher's Stone. The white witch slowly began to spin the Crystallogical Stone, suspended from a gold chain. Miriam Benjamin concentrated. She saw visions of Paradise, but her mind didn't tarry there--it was not what she sought. She saw the seven hells, but did not linger there, either; saw all over the world; saw penguins in Antarctica; elephants in India; koala bears in Australia; deer in Albion; reptiles, coyotes, bears, wolves. Finally she located Farber. She jerked the crystal away from herself, sobbing hysterically. "Where is he?" Sophie demanded, listened in wrapt attention, forgetting even the damaged shard of a woman that Ben had become after touching the mind of the Sorceress Diana. "He...he's about to die!" Ben cried in horror. "He's on acid; he's in the subterranean sectors right now, being pursued by Ravens...Diana has issued orders: Shoot to kill! She's just been toying with him so far...now she's out to smash his rebel cult!" # DYING OF THE NIGHT The demon spread its wings, rose.... Salamander was still running, still being pursued. Selfish man that he was, Farber's other-worldly twin thought only of his own safety, forgetting the cultists on the desert, abandoning them to their own acid dreams and their own flight from the Mind-Police. The bird-man had been on his tail for half an hour now; no matter where he ran, it followed--and dozens of others of the bestial bird-men were pouring into the sub-sectors where Salamander was running upon catwalks over vast, churning tanks of liquid energy in a desperate attempt to stay alive. He had a ray-gun. That had been his only salvation, so far. In the burning light which only he saw he checked the chamber: It contained a ruby rod of crystallized flame; droplets of sulfuric acid sprayed onto it dissolved the crystal-light to send beams of fire from the muzzle. The ruby rod was pitted, corroded--he only had a few shots left.... Hiding behind a tremendous pipeline of transmuted magnetic fluid, he took careful aim--as careful as he could with his vision fractured, seeing as though through a broken lens. He fired. The shot went wild; hit a silver vat and scattered like sunset upon a mirror. He cursed, leaping from his hiding place to run farther along the catwalk, hoping for salvation in any form. All at once two voices screamed, "Farber!" He whirled. Then he caught sight of Ben and Sophie, the two women he loved most, his girlfriend and his sister--in that instance the Salamander's possession was shredded like the leaves of an alchemical manuscript which has been rejected by its Author; the man running fleeing the outpouring of Ravens from openings in a crystal ceiling was Simon Farber once more. He was startled, disoriented, confused: The last thing Farber remembered was the VITRIOL acrostic on Smith's laboratory door: VISITA INTERIORA TERRA RECTIFICANDO INVENIES OCCULTUM LAPIDORUM: Visit the interior of the Earth, searching you will find the hidden Stone. As he stood, brain numb with surprise, staring at the oncoming hordes of Ravens, he was completely absorbed by the pulsing, rushing currents of acid--and suddenly realized why the Air-Children where so opposed to it: It was a harsh addiction, not at all like LSD. He looked down and became dizzy as he stood on a thin strand of metal hundreds of feet above an endless enigma of churning machinery. It seemed a metaphor of the world to the Newtonian materialists; but he was not distracted by this riddle long: He looked up, saw screaming hordes of demons falling out of the sky. Too stoned to obey the two women, he broke and ran once again even as they shouted, "Keep hidden! We'll save you!" They had weapons with them. They had the Philosopher's Stone: The immense divining crystal which Ben had used to locate him was also a tremendously powerful weapon because it had control over any living creature through its sympathetic magic. Ben held the Stone up. Sophie fired a beam of pure liquid electricity through its heart. While Ben invoked a mystical incantation the fluid force scattered into a thousand scintillating beams, striking at the hearts of the demonic things dropping from above. With a tremendous screaming they all fell to their death, all except their leader--defended by his own magical Stone. The Raven sprang at Farber; its flight broken, stroboscopic as the evil drug yet worked its mind-magic. When the bird-man struck Farber the blow was not a single impulse but a series of hammerings, as though he were being pounded by a clockwork mechanism. Simon fell through the spaces between the pathways, shouting a final scream of agonized love for the Two. His words were drowned in an infinite series of echoes. He landed in a vat of magnetic fluid. The liquid broke into globules, mercurial droplets which hung in the air above awhile before resuming their corkscrew shape and cascading down. He struggled to keep afloat, but spiral vortices of force drew him to the center of the tank. The hot liquid crushed him. Millions of agitated springs seeped through him, entering his eyes where they made all the colors of light play. His skin cracked from the heat. His blood flowed through the magnetism in streamlets that were quickly dispersed by the agitated magnetic corpuscles, dying the ethereal liquid red, ruby, rose. Like twilight to a dawn of the damned. Farber was dead, ash in the shape of a man at the center of a tremendous vermilion sarcophagus, a crystal of pure solid magnetism--stained with the blood of his dying. # End of file Press RIGHT ARROW (#6 key) of the numeric keypad to load the next file.