Starblood

so interesting. He realized that, having fulfilled this part of his evolution, he had divorced himself completely from empathy with other human beings. But his hatred remained: there was a job to do on the Brethren, and he would see it done. Besides, as he concentrated on the problem of finding their headquarters and tearing down their organization, his mind was free from worrying about the future, a future bound to be lonely, a future with a challenge so large it frightened him…
    "I'm afraid you'll get yourself in trouble," she said as he was closing the door of the car behind her. "They're tough men."
    "And
I'm
god," he said.
    She started the car then, as she realized he did not want to talk any more and that he would not be swayed by any arguments she could give. "Be careful," she said.
    "I don't have to."
    When the car was out of sight, he walked back to the house on his invisible legs, no longer using the grav-plate mobility mechanism in his silver trunk cap. At the house, he called his servos to his side and smashed them repeatedly against the wall until they were shattered and useless. He no longer needed those, either.
    He reached out with his psi and opened the door.
    It swung inward.
    He went inside and drifted up the steps toward the second floor where the four drugged members of the Brethren awaited him…

CHAPTER 11
    The four Brothers were exactly as Timothy had left them, slumped on the floor in almost comic disarray, like tired children who had flung themselves down in exhaustion and had swiftly fallen asleep. Margle had slid down in his tulip chair until he was precariously close to falling out of it, into the cavity under his desk. The sound of their breathing was even and deep, indicating that they would require quite a few more hours of unconsciousness before they would fully weather the effects of the darts and could move without grogginess.
    Which suited Ti's purposes perfectly.
    He drifted to Jon Margle and extended prying fingers of thought into his mind without totally occupying the body as he had done earlier. The analogue of the house was the continued manner in which Timothy's own mind chose to present Margle's thoughts to him. In the main ballroom, the dancing had stopped and colorful figures had disappeared. The place was empty, desolate, like the littered morning-after of a party. This, of course, was the conscious mind that had been stilled by the narcotics in the darts. In the cellar, the demons teemed as fully as before. And though there were many things that were not in the cellar of his mind, in the subconscious, that had been in his conscious, there were a number of things Ti could discover.
    It had come as a suprise when he had discovered earlier that Jon Margle, and his brother Klaus before him, were nothing more than figureheads, puppets painted to look like authority, but with all the strings carefully hidden. The Inner Council made all the decisions, a group consisting of Leopold and six other men Margle could not even name. But surpassing this revelation was what Timothy learned as he probed the Brother's subconscious now. Besides Margle's ignorance about his superiors, the man had no knowledge whatsoever concerning the source of PBT!
    Refusing to believe such could be the case, he rampaged through the cellars of Margle's subconscious mind, prodding the hideous denizens of these lairs (beings which were concretizations of Margle's id longings, the festering fantasies of his ego), searching for some clue he might have overlooked. But there was nothing in his mind, in the vast catalogue of the man's data storage cells, that pointed to any solution of the mystery.
    At last, perplexed, he left the mind. He turned to Leopold next, and probed lightly into his quieted mind. Surely a man of the Inner Council would know where the stuff came from, where the home lab was, and what might compose the unidentifiable substance.
    In dealing with the totally different mind of Leopold, Timothy's psionic system established another type of analogue of the Brother's thoughts. Instead of a house that had represented Jon Margle's mental landscape, there was a towering, thousand-storied block building whose walls glittered dark emerald, a sinister color that seemed shot through with pulsing veins and clotted, dark lumps of indefinable material. Inside the structure, the walls were ringed with data banks, billions upon billions of memory units storing nearly every minute detail of Leopold's life;