Lexicon

years. It seemed vaguely amusing now. Infantile. But he remembered the loneliness. The way his body reacted when a woman smiled at him, the surge of desire it evoked to join with her, not merely in a physical sense but beyond that, to confide and be understood. It had been almost overwhelming. Then he discovered God.
    It had been terribly alarming. The very idea, a poet succumbing to religion! He was shocked at himself. But the feeling was undeniable and grew week by week. He could no longer believe he was alone. He began to see the divine in everything, from the circumvoluted fall of a leaf to the fortuitous arrival of an elevator. Occasionally, when the sterility of his job pressed close, he felt the presence of God like a figure in the room. God was with him. God loved him. It was ridiculous, but there it was.
    It was a tumor, of course. Oligodendroglioma, a cancerous growth in an area associated with feelings of enlightenment
.
The feelings it aroused could be reproduced through electrical stimulation. It wasn’t fatal, but it would need to be removed, his surgeon told him, as Yeats looked over the black-and-white scans, because it would continue to grow. Over time, there would be less and less of him and more of the tumor. His brain was being eaten by God.
    He left the clinic in fine spirits. He had no intention of removing the tumor. It was the perfect solution to his dilemma: how to feed his body’s desire for intimacy. He was delusional, of course. There was no higher presence filling him with love, connecting him to all things. It only felt that way. But that was fine. That was ideal. He would not have trusted a God outside his head.
    • • •
    The door opened and a woman stepped through. She was wearing a long white coat that reached the floor. The hem was spattered black with liquid that might have been mud or dirt or might have been Frost. She had white gloves. A necklace, something on it that twisted and hurt to look at. He closed his eyes. He reached into his diaphragm for his strongest voice. “
Vartix velkor mannik wissick! Do not move!
”
    There was silence. “Ow,” said Woolf. “That kind of hurt.”
    He groped for his desk drawer.
    “Credit to you, Yeats. I spent a long time preparing for you to say those words. And I still felt them.”
    He got the drawer open. His fingers closed on a gun. He raised it and squeezed the trigger. He kept firing until the clip was empty. Then he dropped it to the carpet and listened.
    “Still here.”
    There was a sword on the wall behind him. Three hundred years old, but it could cut. He had no training. But that might not matter, if she came close enough. She might think it was decorative, until too late.
    “So I’m here to kill you,” she said, “just in case there was any doubt.”
    He breathed. He required a few moments to calm himself. “Emily.”
    “Woolf,” she said. “Woolf, now.”
    Interesting. Had she changed segments? It was possible. She might not have merely improved her defense but managed to alter her base personality in certain important ways. It could be done, with practice. In which case, she would be vulnerable to a different set of words. Yes. She would have rejected her previous self in order to distance herself from what she had done in Broken Hill. He needed to figure out what she had become. “How did you get here?”
    “Walked, mostly.”
    “The lobby was supposed to contain a fairly overwhelming number of security personnel.”
    “The goggle guys? Yeah. They’re screened somehow, right? Filtered against compromise.”
    “They’re supposed to be.”
    “They are. But Frost isn’t.”
    “Ah,” he said. “So there were no goggle guys.”
    “Nope.”
    Difficult to read a person you couldn’t see. The visual cues were so important. But it could be done. He could do it. The important thing was that she was still talking. “I gather you feel wronged by me?”
    “You could say that.”
    “Well,” he said. “I won’t demean us both by pretending to apologize. But may I point out that killing me won’t serve your interests?”
    “Actually, I disagree with you there. I mean, I thought about it. Come here with the word, make you run the organization for me; that would be interesting. And I can’t deny there is a real appeal in turning you into my slave for life. But that’s not an option. I have a little problem, you see. I picked it up in Broken Hill, when you sent me to deploy that kill order. I kind of