A Darkness in My Soul

heavens-nor for the much broader changes I wished to bring about in the world.
        I settled down to bringing a new face to the Earth, enjoying every moment of my godhood-perhaps too well…
        

    III
        
        And there, in that hospital room in the upper floors of the Artificial Creation complex, with the dead and bleeding mutant form before me, I knew the greatest triumphs of my entire life. I ranged far from those white walls, though I never once rose from the chair in which I sat. I flew over seas and continents without benefit of a bodywithout even an analogue form-to contain my psychic energies. Miracles were within my grasp now, and though I did not change any water into wine or raise any men from the dead, I did other things, yes, other things…
        The first order of business, so far as I was concerned, was to reach downward through the floors of the great structure and locate that place where I had been born, where plastic womb had contained me and where wired uterus had spit me out. It was no sentimental journey, no longing for a return to those cold mother walls, but the bitter-sweet taste of a deeply abiding vengeance.
        I sent my awareness drifting down through the layers of the huge building, through plaster and lath, plastic and steel, through electrical conduits and wads of fluffy insulating material. I passed the radiating awareness of other human beings, but did not stop to handle them just yet, bent on the confrontation I had dreamed of for years.
        Oedipal?
        Not exactly. I did not want to kill my father and marry my mother, merely to kill my mother and be free. Certainly, there was a quality of love in it too, but that was easily overlooked.
        I found the lowest two floors, where the paraphernalia of the genetic engineers cored the walls like fungus, filaments threaded through the plaster like disease worms.
        Machines descended from the ceilings of the rooms, thrust upward from the floors. There were blocks of data processing computers, memory banks and calculating components which handled everything from temperature regulation to DNA-RNA balance in the chemical sperm and egg.
        Along the walls and on various raised platforms around the floor there were programming keyboards for the men and women who maintained the delicacy of the computers' decisions.
        In every great chamber, the center of attention was the womb itself. It was contained in a large, square glass tank whose exterior walls were more than three inches thick.
        Between these outer petitions and the meat of the nut, there were thinner layers of grass along with fiberglass wads of insulation. In the center were the nonconductive plastic walls, cored with the miles of wires reporting conditions back to the computers. There were electrode nubbins there by the tens of thousands, and waldoes so minuscule as to be unbelievable were doing impossibly tiny things to impossibly tiny creations, spheres of cells not yet remotely shaped like human beings.
        Mother…
        The womb, darkness, quietude, thrumming pulse of hidden works felt more than heard…
        There were more than eighty technicians and medical attendants clustered in the rooms of the genetic engineering equipment, all of them busy. I reached out with my godly esp and took control of every one of their minds.
        Work ceased; conversation broke off in midsentence. I directed them out of that place, upward through the building to regions of safety.
        I surveyed the place as a sense of power stirred in me the like of which I had never experienced before. It was not the magnitude of the feeling, but the quality which made it so different. For the first time, I understood my godhood in a personal sense, understood that revenge was possible on a scale that I had never before comprehended.
        I had not been able to release that pent-up vengeance on a man, like Morsfagen, because pity had outweighed anger.
        But I could never pity a machine, a thing without feelings.
        I realized that my vengeance would always have to be directed against ideas and things and constructions borne of those ideas rather than against men; all men were pitiable in their stupid blindness to fact, but the creations of that stupidity, the ideas and ideals based on that stupidity deserved nothing but loathing and condemnation.
        For a moment, I had the fleeting thought that this