CULT OF THOTH

    The truth is not distorted here, but rather, a certain distortion is used to get at the truth.  If we admit, as we must, that appearance is not the same thing as reality, then we must give the artist the liberty to make certain rearrangements of nature if these will lead to greater depths of vision.

-- Flannery O'Connor

    Rick threw off the tangled bedsheet, violence against the stinking heat.  He sat up on realizing he was sweaty from head to foot.  The windows were still shut and the fan inoperable.  The fug evoked a memory in him, and he struggled deliciously to distinguish it as he walked to the fridge.  It was all about the struggle, he thought as he yanked open the door and peered into ghastly light; the struggle was the thrill of the writer, to grapple with the irrational and know it would come out, ultimately, in words that would stick together.  He had it: an afternoon from his teen-hood, after-grad, an afternoon he fell to his knees beneath the weight of the angst (sweet untranslatable German word).  He'd been considering suicide.  It was just about too much for him, to live and live and write and write away a whole summer in one room, a room with a beautiful tree outside, he recalled.  How literary.  How much had really changed?
    He grabbed a two-litre carton of milk, and went to look up "Thoth" in the encyclopedia.  This was tradition, to look up the weirdest damn thing that came to mind- someone had said something yesterday to trigger the word in his head, something stupid and unrelated, he was sure.  Maybe he'd been drunk.
    The heavy leather-bound volume, T, fell open on the desk, stirring a little dust.  Who thought about stuff like the gods of Egypt any more, but him, unless they appeared in a feature film tied up in bandages?  Brushing the pages over with his free hand, he tipped back the carton with infinite care and sipped.  Ah, here.  Thoth, wisest of the Egyptian gods, designed the universe, responsible in some part for writing.  Seshat, his wife.  OK.  Writing, that was it, that was the twig.  There was always a reason behind the weirdest damn thing.  Thoth wrote the universe.  What had Rick accomplished?  He shook his head, set down the carton.  He flipped to a random entry and began to read without absorbing.

    It was dark now, and Rick pulled on his windbreaker with haste as he walked.  The open-air hallways of the apartment block had a caustic sort of air, an air of breakdown, of failed completion.  Like they were never quite finished, like you could wander through the halls for a few hours, then go to the clinic and find out you burned your lungs just a little with lime from raw cement.  Did they still put lime in cement?  Rick's brown loafers splashed in and out of streetlit puddles blown across the parking lot from the late rainfall, jagged broken incandescent reflections.
    There was the bus stop; he'd go across the bridge into town, to Club Faux again.  Faux wasn't a dive, but nor was it a hive of enlightened thinking; Rick saw it as the Den of Iniquity in the Eyes of the Moral Humanist.  Each night, fake-ID-toting teen-agers of every ethnicity and creed would gather in its rather dreary basement (Rick had known it previously as a hardware store) to flail their bodies at each other, glorying in the temporary effects of expensive chemicals few, if any of them, would ever gain the knowledge to understand.  The logic of the modern dance scene eluded Rick.  How was it sensible to party all night, with loud music, then spend the day depressed and yearning in quietude?  Were they as badly off as himself?  God.
    The bus pulled up looking like an elongated demon skull, its interior yellowed by the dusty glass and fluorescent lighting.  The doors admitted Rick, and he pushed a coin into the slot machine, heard it ring.  The bus pulled out with a lurch as he walked to the back and felt, as he walked, the collective stare of the dozen or so other riders facing him; the unified gaze of citizens, of a people he regarded in the main as stupefied, cowed by belligerent jocks and god-mongers into believing, truly believing it was a terrible thing, to be a person of wit.
    And it was, if you were Rick, he thought, if you were the only person you'd ever known who refused to rely on any of e-mail, instant messaging, cell-phone, pager; if you were a rotary-dial kind of guy.  He smiled at his own turn of phrase.
    An ad started to play over the speaker system, and he tried not to notice as the heads of the people inclined as though wired together, toward the bright images projected up on the ceiling.  Instead Rick focused on the grooved speckled floor until an ad appeared there, too, an actress smiling at him with a drink in her hand.  Eye targeting, improved projector heads on these buses.  "Try a Hippo today!"

    He saw the same ad again, later at the club.  Only this time it was an interactive version that played on a screen above the bar.  A slim blonde teenager was arguing with it, shouting over the pounding dance music.  "I don't wanna pay another buck.  Why should I?"  Girls stood around her, waiting to order.
    The program-actress smiled while the program thought.  Rick thought it looked grossly condescending.  Then it said, "It's two ounces instead of one.  You'll buy fewer drinks."  The voice came from adjacent stereo speakers, spatially unrelated to the image's mouth.  The girl was done for, Rick realized: she'd been made to justify this absurd conversation to herself.  She'd buy a drink.  Rick leaned forward to observe the endgame.
    "But I only really need one drink."
    The girl beside her huffed.  "C'mon, Anna, hurry up and choose!"
    The computer leered again.  "I think you know what you want."
   "Fine.  Gimme a Hippo."
    Rick rolled his eyes.  Sure, it was grudging, but acquiescence was acquiescence.  Who wants to drink a "Hippo"?  He swirled the dregs in his glass, seeking the twist of lime, that had become trapped underneath the ice chips.  Anna and friend passed on their way toward the dance floor, laughing.

    There came a point late in the night, Rick observed, when Club Faux seemed to pivot about his seat, where everyone seemed caught up in the great illusion and moved like one big cam in its machine as they danced and circulated.  The light in the club was gaudy and hallucinatory, but Rick found the new music they played to be drab, in a way, and sad.  Gone, disregarded the variation of the Romantics and the delicious rubato; all that remained, really, was a kind of Baroque sensibility along with innumerable references to the human heartbeat and symmetrical physiognomy - and of course, sex.
    Rick's ballpoint fell from his teeth.  "Thoth" he had written on the printed cardboard coaster from his fourth Hippo.  The sweat from the Hippo was making the letters bleed, but he could still make out the word.  He felt a fuzzy amusement, holding the damp rectangle between his fingers, that such things as coasters still existed.  As he fumbled for a pertinent memory, the lights flared and went out, and the music broke off with a blast of noise.  The clumping of feet could clearly be heard for a second, in the newly minted silent darkness, before screams and the sounds of things breaking, things hitting flesh whirled around Rick, as he ducked to the surface of the table, dumbfounded.  What had happened?  He felt a clout across the back of his head, like an arm.  Not an attack, no, someone else unaccustomed to loss of sight.
    The cries around Rick continued as threw his arms over his head and visualized the layout of the place as a singed smell reached his nostrils.  His drink was knocked away.  Where was a fire door?  He stood, grabbed his pen and shoved it in his shirt pocket, wincing, knowing vividly in the moment that the cap was on the wrong end, that it would stain.  Then he struck out into the blackness, still holding the coaster.  His fingertips brushed some long hair and a breast, he thought, then there was a cavernous space in front of him.  Go West, there was a door there last night.  Still the shouts, but more articulate now, names, people freaking out, embryonic plans for assembly, for escape.  Rick's shoulder bashed into a cold, upright piece of metal he fell through as it hinged: door.  He felt his way to a handrail, and up to the street.

    The sun was rising on an unhappy city.  Rick picked up the cold receiver of a public phone, wet with dew, to find no tone, no idiot light on the box.  It smelled burnt-out.  As the sun crested the giant hulk of the mall and hit the sidewalk, Rick noticed a city bus up ahead, and broke into a trot to see the driver leaning on the closed door, with a cigarette.  He was shaking his head; nonetheless Rick went right up to him.  "What's the problem?"
    The driver was lean and sour-looking, and tired.  "My baby here's fried... all the electronics.  There's a big puddle of circuit board under the hood.  I can't even lock the door.  And my buddy around the corner on the Crosstown's the same way."
   "You know where there's a phone that'll work?"
    "Sorry, I know what you mean.  I gave up finding one like, an hour back.  I can't even call a mechanic."
    Rick thought about his manuscripts, work he could never quite reproduce from memory.  He'd lost a finished story once when his old house burned down, and had despaired to recreate it; it wasn't the same, the moment was gone!  Now all his articles, fiction, his reviews and what hurt him most, his secret, rudimentary attempts at satire, were trapped miles away.
    He began thinking of EMP weapons, how they shorted everything out in a certain radius, and wondered if troops could be far behind.  Wondered if his cigarette-smoking bus driver had thought that far ahead.  "Take care."
    "Yeah, you too buddy."

    Rick lit a cigarette of his own, shivering a little, trying to remember the shape of the city and outlying districts.  There was a corridor through the public park, Meier Park, that was it, that led into the wildlife preserve; they'd left it for some migratory species until last year, when they left it simply because the land was caught up in development lawsuits.  He could get out that way, hit the old library en route, pick up some basic survival knowledge.  He didn't want to stick around for the urban warfare, if that was what was quickly coming due; and well, why bother with his manuscripts?
    This thought was sudden and shocked him.  He got them right, he knew it, and was heartily sick of reading them.  Why lie?  Nobody else would read them, but they were perfected, completed, and that was the important part.  He resigned himself: his body, his brain, and what he carried.
    There was a pain in his gut as he started walking, a feeling of falling away.
 
 

ï ï ï

    In a brilliant whirl of sunshine and cherry-red bike frame it was over.  Jo found herself sitting on the shoulder of the empty rural highway.
    She covered her face with her hands, then slowly unclipped her helmet.  A piece of gravel had pushed into the side and left a cavity in the styrofoam.  Jo grasped the edge and twisted, a chunk breaking off.  Her fingers slipped and the chunk fell in the dust.
    Then she noticed the dull ache in her knee was giving way to stinging, bad stinging.  There was a piece of skin torn away, and blood was running down her leg.
    "Aw, fuck!!  What the-"
    Setting down the helmet, she tried to wipe up the blood, then found nowhere really to wipe her bloody hand.  She wiped it on the grass.

    Jo limped back towards town.  She'd seen last bus pass her, like a harbinger, not more than five minutes before she hit the bump.  She was starting to feel shivery, and a little light-headed.  Her knee hurt too much to apply pressure, so she bled.  What had this measured out as last summer, a 10k route?  20k?
    In the distance, someone was walking along the shoulder, towards her.  Jo raised her hand and waved, stumbling.  The figure broke into a jog.
    It got closer and closer as Jo stood still, leaning on her good knee.  It was a man maybe in his forties, wearing sandals and a strange robe-like piece of clothing with brightly coloured stripes.  "I'm Thoth.  You need help, don't you?"
    "Yes."
    He helped her sit down off the road, then kneeled, bent closer.  "You need to get that looked at.  That little flap of skin'll need a stitch, and to have the gravel pried out."  He looked concerned.  "We can't let you stiffen up.  C'mon, I'll take you to my camp."
    Without waiting for a response, he took Jo's arm across his neck and began lifting her to her feet.  Jo made herself yield; she hurt too much.  She'd met hippies before, and this guy seemed harmless; better, pretty knowledgeable and eager to help.  So what if he had a weird name.  Hippies were often like that.
    They staggered down the shoulder in silence for a few dozen metres, moving away from town.  As they turned into a driveway so overgrown Jo never would have spotted it, Thoth spoke again.  "Honestly, you should consider spending the night, too; in fact I may have to insist.  You don't know the way and you're probably going to be living down the shock for a while yet.  Watch out for that rounded stone."  They were descending into the gradual shade of the edge of the forest, down an old overgrown logging road.
    "And you've got no food, clean clothes.  Just out for a joyride, right?"  He clicked his tongue, smiled.  Jo was silent.  The reality of her situation was becoming clearer.  They continued on a few steps further.
    Then she said, "It's a good thing it was just me and the bike on the road."  She thought as she heard herself say it that the syllables were like little capitulations, little acceptances.  What else could she do?
    "Yes, I would hate to have had you tangle with a car or something nastier."
    It was getting dusky.

    She was stumbling with Thoth down the weedy track, listening.  He was saying stuff in response to some question she'd asked, she'd forgotten.  She was shivering.
    "The first thing we do if someone wants to leave is find out why, and see if we can't give them what they really want right here."  He smiled as he bent a huge thistle stem aside with his sandal so the two of them could get by.  Jo watched the purple crown nod and sag into the bushes.  "There've only been two people we couldn't satisfy in seven years.  People have much simpler needs than most realize."
    "What... what happens when a hunter or someone comes along?"
    "They join us, if they've got any sense we can appeal to."  He laughed.  "I've just ended a sentence with a preposition."
    "What-"

    Thoth whisked Jo through the tiny village that sprang up through the trees, unannounced by mechanical noise or light.  The buildings were like round swollen hills, made of oversized bricks or sacks, the colour of dirt.  The "healing" hut, as he named it, was smaller with a thatched roof, lit only by failing sunlight.  Jo saw a man in a brown tunic in the doorway, who rose as he saw they were in distress.
    "How can I help?"
    "Greetings, Charles, we have a lady named Jo who has had an accident with her knee."
    Jo and Charles were brought face to face for a moment; he was bearded and young, maybe 20, long hair wound into a bun.  He smiled at her.  Then he squatted and examined Jo's leg, holding her calf in his hands.  "Sit her down on the threshold, I'll be right out."  He vanished into the hut.
    "Charles is our healer; he took to medicine the best of any of us.  I taught him most of what he knows.  I credit him with the rest."  Thoth loomed, still on his feet.  He looked up.
    Charles was holding a white needle and a length of something fine.  "Now lie down... I'm going to apply some accupressure."
    It felt like groping, and Jo nearly shrieked, but was startled to find her pain deadened almost immediately.  She wouldn't look as Charles saw to the wound.  He might decide to lick it clean or something and she didn't want to know.
    Then he was winding her knee with a piece of cloth.  "Against the evening cold.  I've put in two sutures that'll need to be cut later."  He smiled and looked into Jo's eyes.  "It ought to close up quite nicely."  Jo felt rattled by the clarity in his look.  He had an open, unassuming expression, like a trusted friend.

    As day faded into night, the villagers gathered to share a dimly lit meal.  Jo was gently separated from Thoth in the semidark by a press of people carrying baskets and fistfuls of picked plants.  She followed to where there was an earth mound like a stage.  They collected in front of it in a loose circle and began seating themselves on the ground.  Most of them were in their twenties, but there were a few kids running around, goofing off.  The thought of kids living in a way-out hippie environment made Jo uneasy.  She sat clumsily, babying her knee, and looked around for Thoth.
    He came last in the procession.  He approached Jo, said, "I should tell you, we eat what's glibly referred to as raw food.  Please help yourself."
    Then he left her and with another man, a young man with dark skin, walked into the circle and sat, their backs to the stage.
    Jo took a handful of starchy things from a basket that was making the rounds.  She had just started to nibble when people began speaking, addressing everyone, as if there was a running discussion that had been unmuted.  A young woman said from her seat on a rock, "I've been thinking about taking a shower recently, to, you know... get really clean."  She shrugged, not seeming ashamed or fearful of judgment.
    "In the shower is one of the coolest places in the world, it's true," Thoth said.  "You get gently bombarded with comforting warm water and you can turn it on and off whenever you feel like because of your income.  But it's also mixed up."
    A little boy who had settled cross-legged in the clean dust of the clearing said, "I think it sounds like a bad science place."  His neighbour spoke up, another young boy.  "It sounds like it feels nice."
    They both looked at Thoth, who was eating.  He formulated his response while chewing, swallowed.  "Well, the problem is that human beings are very vulnerable in the shower; naked and unprepared for much, and surrounded by hard, slippery surfaces.  There's quite a bit of anxiety expressed about it in their culture.  You'd never find such a strange danger in the woods."
    The second boy said, "Would you tell us about the swimming pool again?"
    Thoth smiled darkly.  "Don't get too enraptured by the idea."  The kids didn't seem to balk at the unusual word.  "The swimming pool is a wonderful place, where almost anyone can go to a big lighted palace and swim with many other human beings, and interact with them socially.
    "But if you're sick in certain ways, if you get a communicable disease for example, often you wouldn't be allowed to use the swimming pool."
    "But that's unfair."
    "Well, the tragic thing is it's common sense, to keep people safe.  They have to do it that way.  They live too close together, eat wrong and disturb nature, which naturally fights back; they are all diseased in and because of how they choose to live."

    It was pitch black and Jo was wired: she couldn't sleep in the "earth house".  There was something off-kilter about this place, about the people.  There was somehow more to it than how they lived, they were too balanced, too well-spoken to be squatters in the back woods.
    She lay awake on her back, on a raised earth platform ranged with sleeping bodies.  Her knee throbbed.  She imagined worms crawling through the tamped soil building blocks over her head.  Was that possible?
    She dug her cell out of her shorts, wadded them back beneath her neck, and searched through the glowing menus to find a little game to play to kill time.  Maybe she'd get tired in a little while.

    Eventually, she must have fallen asleep, because she woke to the sounds of children running and playing.  Sunlight was shining on the clearing and streaming in at the door.
    She yawned and rolled out of bed, amazed to be feeling fine.  All that fresh air must've done it to me, she thought and stretched her arms above her head.  Then she reached for her shorts.
    She looked up as one of the running kids skidded and glanced off an adult, hit the ground.  He started to cry and the adult and other children immediately moved in and all started comforting him, helping him up, dusting him off.  The child happened to look at Jo.  His expression changed as she sat watching, became almost hostile.  Then the adult, a thin brunette woman, was looking at Jo with a similar attitude, pursing her lips and shaking her head very slightly.  The woman patted the child on the back, motioning for the kids to get moving.  She followed them out of Jo's sight.

    The circle of houses was baking in the sun.  There was only one person in the clearing, seated on the stage at the far end, the young dark-skinned man, Thoth's assistant or whatever from the dinner circle.  As Jo watched from the doorway, he rose and walked to the edge of the clearing, vanishing behind one of the smaller houses.  She craned her neck to find him again.  Then she saw him ascending a tree, quicker than she recalled him walking.  She drifted out into the open as he climbed higher and higher until he swayed at the very top.  He was forty or fifty feet up.
    Jo's mouth was open with amazement.  He was fearless.  She hesitated to call out to him.  "Hey... hey!"
    "Hey what?"
    Jo thought.  "Aren't you worried you'll fall?"
    He laughed; he had a beautiful laugh.  "You just have to know how to hold the branches."
    "What if a branch breaks?"  Jo gasped as he suddenly dropped about 10 feet and hung there like a jungle cat, in a state of total confidence and relaxation.
    He grinned.  "I'm Felipe, I remember all of Thoth's teachings and keep track of our history and what everybody says."
    "Jo."
    "Nice to meet you."  Jo clapped her hands to her eyes as he initiated another swift descent.  When she dared to look he was strolling towards her.
    She let out a pent-up breath.  "Shit that's scary.  People die doing that.  Where is everyone?"
    Felipe shrugged.  "Harvesting.  You know, death is only bad for people who treat other people like possessions."
    "How's that?  And why pull stunts like that when you're so important here?"
    "Because it's fun.  But you'll think that's a shitty answer."
    "Yes... I do."  Jo grinned.  They grinned at each other.
    Then Felipe said, "D'you want to take a walk?  I'll show you the gorge."

    She walked with him along a quiet stretch of water that reflected the opposite shore like a sheet of glass.  There was so little pollution, not a tire or six-pack ring in sight.  The land appeared untouched.
    It was a stunning day.  She was pleased at the state of her knee.  And chatting with Felipe, her opinion of the village began to stabilize.  He explained to her when she asked why the kids and woman had seemed so resentful toward her: any child, or person in distress deserved the help of anyone present and able, that was how they did things.  He laughed when she told him about mothers with crying babies in the mall, how everyone just tried to ignore them.  Then he smiled sadly and shook his head.
    Later on, as they sat on a giant piece of driftwood and watched the tide coming in, he amazed her by repeating endless lists of things people had said at evening circle.  He recited the previous night's discussion of swimming pools, word for word.  He could even mimic some of the vocal nuances of the different people.  She was sure he had total recall.  And he was obviously in incredible shape.  And he was cute, she thought guiltily, and so was that Charles.  Maybe there was something to all this extreme naturalistic living.

    But come evening circle, the doubts rose again.  It wasn't a fit environment, she thought, though she couldn't figure why.  She ate little and barely heard the discussion.  Attempts at analysis frustrated her into not being able to sleep, so she dug out her phone again and played games while the others slept.
    Presently the glow illuminated a small shape at her side.  "Oh!  Hi..."
    "Hi, I'm Harvey."  He talked softly, glancing around at the sleepers.  Then his eyes were fastened to the glowing screen.
    "You're the boy who asked about the swimming pool, two nights ago."
    Harvey smiled and bit his fingernail.  "Can't sleep.  Wha's tha'?"  He pointed with his free hand.
    "This?  This is my little phone.  I'm just playing a game on it right now, 'cause I'm bored... or I was until you showed up.  I can't sleep either," Jo whispered.
    Harvey sat tentatively on the edge of the sleeping platform, so Jo scooted over to give him space to lie back and look on.  "See, you spin the wheel and then guess a letter to fill in a few words, usually some familiar catch phrase, then you guess it to win!"
    Harvey thought.  "What's a letter?"
    "Well, a letter's..."  What?  Wait-  "Letters make up the alphabet.  There are twenty-six and you can spell any word and make sounds and whatever you want."  Was this for real?  Was she having to tell a kid this, who should be in second grade?
    "Tell me."
    Jo set her jaw.  "Okay, well, we can tell you how to write your name.  Let's start with that.  Are you good at drawing?"

    "Get up!  Get up!"
    "What the hell's going on!?  Ow!"  Jo yelped as she flexed her injured knee, which had stiffened overnight.  It was morning, chilly.
    "Shut up!  Just- c'mere!"  This was under his breath as he grabbed her t-shirted elbow roughly.
    "But I don't have any pants on!  Shit-"  She fell off the sleeping platform and hit the earthen floor, only to be wrenched to her feet and pulled away.
    On the fighting way out of the house and down through the clearing, Jo and Thoth passed Harvey.  He was sitting over by the next dwelling with a small crowd of villagers around him.  He was saying, "Look, I didn't like the Y so I put another E at the end."  HARVEE was written in the dust, they were all looking at it.

    Thoth looked to make sure no-one had followed them into the trees.  "What the hell do you think you're doing, teaching our children?  Who the hell do you think you are?"  He grabbed her and shook her, his fingers like iron.
    "Ow.  I just taught him to write his name, you ass."
    "That's how it starts.  You knew!  You knew we had different ways!!"  He released her, and now he jabbed the air open-handed.  "Who do you think you are?"
    "But your ways are wrong.  Only the worst places in the world lack basic education now."  Jo really wanted to check her knee, see if the tumble had split it open again.  He was freaking out; she'd look later.
    "Your world," Thoth pointed at Jo's head, "is the product of my old hateful trick, of giving writing to humans and stealing memory.  You live outside yourselves, like puppets on electric strings; you shower unnatural suffering on your animal bodies and souls, and let your minds waste like slugs drying on a sidewalk.  You are brainwashed, a dangerous tool; you are of the Cult of Thoth from before!  Stop lousing up my plan to fix it!!"
    "You told them all you're Thoth, the god?  They believe that??"
    "YES!!"  Here the fury left him; he sagged back into a nearby tree.
    Jo tried to calm herself.  Was there a way she could unwind his logic, make him see reason?  A breeze stirred the forest canopy and she shuddered in her shirt and panties.  Anger and outrage wouldn't be enough.  She needed to get out of here, get some real medical help, then come back for the kids.
   Suddenly he spoke:
    "I was born Richard Edwin Phelps.  Rick," he added, looking at Jo for a moment.  She looked back, and found meeting his gaze disturbingly easy.
    He continued.  "All my life, I aspired to write fiction.  And I was good at it, but I could never get a publisher.  So I broke down and made editing my career, which was something else I enjoyed.  I edited college newspapers, literary journals.  Then technology ate my job.
    "I was in a club way downtown during the EMP attack, and blundered out of the darkness to find a dead city.  And I thought to myself, well good thing I don't use a computer to write, but where are all my manuscripts?  I wander down to the park and sort of wack out; there's nothing else to do.  I'm thinking, escape, but I'm also in shock.  Now when I come to, I'm ringed by cute little club girls and boys, and this one girl with glitter still on her eyelids is picking at my sleeve, cause she doesn't understand her world has come crashing down.  Where are the phone numbers, they all wonder?  Where the address book?  The map?  Their homework?  Hell, their grades?  Their birth dates?  Their money?  Hardly in their drug-addled, sense-overloaded pop bubble-heads.  The mush they make people into these days!
    "So I get up, I poll the boys and girls; they're looking for guidance, for a hand to hold to lead them out of the reality they're stuck with, the one that broke like a... like a cheap crappy cellphone hinge.  That's what they wanted, let's be honest.  So we gathered some supplies and lit out of town, into the peninsula wilds."  He sighed.  "I had to walk them until they almost mutinied.
    "Upon my death, once I'd sought the way that they could live, they might have become an entirely oral society, one of thoughtful, respectful, imaginative people in balance with the world along every conceivable axis.  Until you came, bringing infection.  It will spread."
    Jo waited; he was done.  Then she began gently,  "I used to be one of those club girls, and you're right, in its own right it's a shallow existence.  But I figured out, on my own, there's more to life.  I'm no writer.  I'll go back to tending bar if I ever get out of here, but I have friends; I've had lovers; I have a terrific life.  Ploughing through all the popups on the Internet, sitting in traffic, finding a job... it's just like you guys here in the middle of nowhere ploughing fields, digging outhouses or 'harvesting' or whatever.  Only my world isn't built on a lie."
    Thoth's face snapped into anger, as if he would do something rash like wring her soft, city-dwelling neck on the spot.  But then he said, "Try me.  I have to make another trip to the library anyway to do research, to answer all the questions they'll ask me now, try and fight it.  Try me.  Show me this wonderful giving technological world we're all supposed to grow into."

    The walk and bus ride into the city had been tedious.  Thoth or Rick, or whoever he was had insisted on wearing his hippie garb, and people stared at them.
    Not that he noticed.  He in turn stared through people, through cars, through Jo.  He simply ignored everybody like so many blasted trees.  It went without saying that small talk would serve no purpose but to irritate him.

    He looked like a huge exotic bird, walking on carpet, standing in an elevator, waiting in the hallway as she dug her key out of her shorts pocket.  Jo wondered why nothing they'd passed on the way seemed worthy of a puzzled reaction or even idle curiosity, until she remembered that he'd lived in the same city for longer than she had been alive.
    Jo got inside and threw the key in the dish on the kitchen counter.  Thoth followed to her workstation, where she sat and took a deep breath, settling her knee.  She looked over her shoulder at him, wishing he would go away so she could shower, or at least get rid of her clothes and put on a bathrobe.  Or hell, go to the clinic and get patched up.  But he stood there as if they were still in the woods, fighting.
    "You want a chair?  A glass of water?"
    He made no response.
    "OK.  Here goes.  See this?  This is..."
    "The Grayson Records Web.  I'm not a child."
    "...but remember billions of people worldwide have this site at their fingertips.  Here."  She whipped through her bookmark file, clicked.  "All of Conner's philosophical tracts; they're in the public domain now since they found his will."  Click.  "Grant and Michela Foundation for Ecology and Forward Thinking."  Click.  "Animalae Worldwide.  You want to know where skinks live?  What about extinct species?"  Click.  "cyberactivist.ada.org."  Click.  "Indy Reporters post, that's in 155 countries."  Click.  "The BoydOlogy."  Click.  "The Complete Music, Religious and Secular.  Name a composer."
    "Ottorina Mester."
    "I'd have to take your word for that.  Until..."  Jo searched and information links striped the screen.  "Here we are.  Dates, works, six different biographies, letters, journals, unfinished scores and notes."  She looked up at Thoth.  "Are you OK?"
    "I don't know.  I'm in a very rarified headspace."
    "Your way can't hope to have this kind of power," Jo said.  "If you'll just ignore the bad in it for a moment, you'll see it's more than we could ever remember."
    Thoth stroked his chin with his thumb.  "I didn't even know she had any unfinished scores."
    "So will you go back and tell your people the truth yet?"
    Thoth extended his hand.  She grasped it, puzzled.  He looked down, drew a breath, then was silent for what seemed like almost a minute.
    Jo saw his eyes were closed.
    He said, "I need you to let me write my way out of this, gracefully."
    Jo yanked her hand away and frowned.  "No!  You'll just lie and lie and it'll be harder and harder for them to go back!!"
    "All right.  All right.  Listen to me.  They have believed for seven years, seven years! that I am their shepherd, their truth-knower.  Do you want me to abandon them so the weight of the world can... crush their spirits utterly?"  Suddenly he was shouting, spitting.  "Wait until they find the porno, the pollution, pictures of war, sex offender lists, missing children!!"
    "OK!  OK."  Jo sighed and rested her head in her hands.  "God.  Just tell me what you're going to do."
    He settled himself on the leather sofa, as if it were a gilt throne.  "I think I am going to do very little.  Truthfully, I don't think I'm equipped.  I think you will do more."

    And so it was that Jo found herself on the earth mound in the village clearing, wearing four necklaces and a delirious yellow poncho over a silver sequinny dress-thing she'd dug out of the bottom of her closet, and sandals.  All the people were gathered in her eyes, in Thoth's eyes who stood at her side.  Charles and Felipe were there, and Harvey and the boy who'd fallen and the thin woman and the one who'd wanted a shower.  They waited with respect for her to explain herself.
    Thoth glared at her.  "Speak."
    Jo gulped and raised her arms halfway.  "I have returned to you, not as a stranger, but a messenger, a bearer of wisdom.  For in travelling with your beloved Thoth I experienced a rebirth, and come to you now as Seshat, wife of Thoth, giver of new and wonderful truths."  She paused in panic, but remembered the jist of the rest.  "Though I am a goddess, I must plead with you kindly to accept me as you accepted him, for I have much to tell you for you to grow on."  She smiled and let her arms fall, felt a thrill to see the audience smiling too, even a couple of nods and whispered approvals.  The children looked impressed.  Then she curtsied to Thoth and walked over to the step, and down to stand near the people, like he'd said.  Her people, she thought dizzily.
    Then a total hush fell as Thoth opened his mouth to speak.  What bearing the audacious bastard had practised, thought Jo, like a breathing body made out of stone.  Yet he was a man.

    "You have all proven yourselves worthy to access my miraculous gift again, of writing, and all that stems from that first gift.  Now it pains me to tell you that I, Thoth, must give my life in the struggle..."  There was a panicked murmur, and people glanced at each other.  Seshat watched Harvey, who looked like he might cry.  "...to end an age of ignorance and painful labour.  But my sorrow, and yours, should be lessened by the pride I feel for you, my chosen people, who have flowered under the harsh sun of my rule, more brilliantly than I ever could have dreamed."
    He addressed Felipe.  "You must not hold the old laws as dogma; but let them shift and change as your consciousness grows.  It makes sense."  Felipe nodded slowly in response.
    "Do only this always: never forget the power you possess in your minds; you have only glimpsed it these seven years.  But use writing and technology to expand your influence across the face of the Earth, among her denizens, whom you will find wonderful and strange."  The crowd startled a little as Thoth stepped heavily off the mound, and embraced Seshat, who was shocked to feel his body was trembling.  It was the end of the world to him, she thought; and so she picked up the hug, holding Thoth tight as he became plain old Rick again, she imagined.
    Then he pulled away and cut blindly through the crowd.  Hands reached out to brush the fabric of his robes, to touch his shoulders, his upper arms.  But their dying god kept walking, as if through a forest of saplings, until he was clear, until the mothers had to hold their children back, until he had vanished down the logging road, past its distant curve.
 
 

ï ï ï

    "Will I recognize him?"
    "Harvey, you grew up with him.  He's older, but he's not a lot different."  Harvey heard Jo laugh.  "Whoa no."
    "What do you mean?"
    "He's... a character, a bit cynical, and he'd eat your and my brains for breakfast.  He's still the smartest person I've met, no offense kid."
    "None taken."  Harvey thought.  "D'you have anything you want me to say to him?"
    "Mmm... just hi.  You know I'd e-mail him, but I suspect he'd prefer just a hi.  Seems right to me."
    "Alright."
    "You know, I've been thinking about him a lot lately.  Call me when you get back, and tell me how he's doing, OK?"
    "You got it."
    "Bye Harvey."
    "Bye."

    Tonight for the first time in more than 10 years, the two of them would come face to face.  Harvey was nervous.  Phoning him, making the date had been strange; he was unsurprised to be contacted, and they had talked only long enough to choose a coffee place and a time.  Then he had just hung up, after a respectful pause, it was true, but without saying goodbye.  That always unnerved Harvey.
    He turned the lights out and closed up the office.  He'd landed on his feet at Playnix, such a friendly group of people.  A trusted family of parts in a harmonious engine, like this one, he thought as he hefted his new bike, started down the stairs.

    Rain on the roads made Harvey ride with caution, and he arrived with little time to spare.  In the coffee shop, he leaned his bike against the wall and opened his dripping coat, ordered a fair-trade organic coffee at the counter.  Then he sat, his mind spinning, wondering how the man would have aged, if he would show up, if he would be late, what he was doing now...
    There he was.
    "Harvey!  Well, well.  Look at you!"  He grinned and shook his half-furled umbrella, deposited it beside the door, which slowly swung shut against the rainy street, and sounds of cars passing.
    "Hi Rick."  The name sounded strange; Harvey had seen it on the computer, in the phone directory, but never spoken it out loud, maybe not in his whole life.  And now Harvey stood and they shook hands.  Touching the god like this.  Unbelievable.  Cracked, in fact.
    Rick sat down at the little round table, sized him up.  "Damn, didn't you grow up handsome!  I always knew it.  Got a girlfriend?"  He nodded purposefully at the barista.
    Was this old wag the same man who had been present at his birth, who'd spoken with such ceremony and eloquence of his parting gift, and left them all shattered with grief at his passing?  Harvey supposed it must be.  He was the image, only now he was steel-haired, dressed in a shirt and pants; he was here in a coffee shop, like anyone, raising open hands, receiving a cup and a serviette.
    "No. . . uh, haven't time."
    "So what is it you do now?  Refresh my memory.  Computers, right?"
    "Well, I program games.  I write a scenario, a whole world if need be, then hire expert programmers to write the really complicated stuff, and I oversee the whole assembly process.  I've got friends who do graphics."  This was dumbed down, rote from people asking, relatives who liked his career.
    "So you're a small, yet integral component.  You're the helmsman."
    Harvey smiled, taken with Rick's choice of word.  "Yeah.  Yeah, I'd learn about how all of it works, but life's too short, you know?"
    Rick nodded, sipping his coffee.  "Yes.  Yes it is.  So you're into the great and fun illusions of the mind, eh?"
    Harvey sat for a second, then broke character.  "Why do you talk like that?  Why did you have to change all of us?  It hasn't been easy for me, in fact, I'm quite pissed off at you.  I-"  He stopped.
    Rick's mouth was open a little and his lips trembled as he stared back into Harvey's eyes.  Harvey saw only love and respect, like when he was a child, in the face of a man growing obviously old.
    He couldn't bear it.  He slid his chair over with a scrape and put his arms around Rick's shoulders.  "Oh god... I'm sorry."
    "No, no.  You're right.  I didn't know what I know now.  You're a good boy and you like working with elaborate toys that... that entertain and thrill people!  I never meant to undercut that.  You know, fun is really important.  Just remember," he said, breaking the embrace with a tiny movement, "that someday it might all just be gone."
    They looked at each other.
    "You know you taught me to be good to people and the environment," said Harvey.
    "You could've learnt that from the library if you'd known to," said Rick.
    "So who's responsible?  Why is there all this knowledge that isn't getting applied, that could make such a big difference?"
    Rick shook his head.  "Don't look for a culprit.  It's in all of us."  Harvey was about to ask him to explain when he continued.  "People are dumb.  It's part of human function to do things that are grossly selfish or blind or self-fulfilling.  Some people are dumb enough to take advantage of other people's stupidity, but they're just pawns.  The human soul is a bit dumb, and sometimes we can do nothing but humour it," he concluded with a warm smile.
    "But what if it's not?  What if we all have the potential to overcome-"
    "The human soul," said Rick with savage emphasis, "is a bit dumb.  Remember that, rise above it, but don't expect to escape it.  We'll be loving each other and doing dumb shit until we're gone and dust, I'm sure of that."  He tossed back the rest of his cup of coffee.  "Well, I think I'm done here."

    Harvey felt irritated at how Rick had behaved, cutting their meeting short; but as he mounted his bike in the rain, it occurred to him that might not be such a bad thing.  Here was the man who had showed him love and protection, and screwed him up very profoundly, making him for years a virtual outcast.  Well now he was one of the virtual in-crowd, thought Harvey with a laugh as the light turned red and he stood up to glide to a halt.  It was probably best he didn't get reattached.
    Harvey jiggled his bike pedals to keep balanced, moving incrementally forward and backward.  Beside him was a city bus.  He glanced at the luminous ad on its side, then looked up to see Rick's profile, where he sat like a statue in his seat.
    The light turned and the bus pulled out with a lurch; all the heads of the passengers lurching in the same tiny, ridiculous way; all of them human beings unprepared for even a little acceleration.
    Harvey had watched too long; he crashed to the surface of the wet street.