The flesh in the furnace

longer had nightmares about a blond girl with a knife in her belly. Nor did he dream about his father stabbing his mother every night. He was never plagued with an indefinable guilt, and he seemed even to have forgotten Pertos Godelhausser and the five years they had spent together on the road, drifting from city to city in their strange symbiosis.
        They made only thirty or forty miles a day, driving slowly so as not to miss anything. With Belina, it was as if he had four eyes, and every inch of the land dazzled him as it never had before. They camped for two and three days at a time, playing games in the snow and reciting lines at night. Now and then, Bitty Belina would read to him from one of Pertos' old books, and he would fall asleep listening to the lilting music of her sensuously childlike voice as she recounted the exploits of knights and sorcerers, of magicians and barbarian heroes.
        He could even hear her in his dreams, it seemed: pleasant dreams where the sun and the water spoke like Bitty Belina and comforted him with heat and with coolness.
        When the idiot finally dozed, his slack face averted, chin on his chest, Bitty Belina quietly closed the book she had been reading from and laid it on the floor. Rising, she hurried to the front wall of the cargo hold where they lived. She climbed the rungs of a stool, stepped from the seat of that to the control console of the Furnace beside it. She looked into the empty capsule-womb, then went to the pair of knobs and worked them back and forth, getting the feel of things. She took a wafer from the identity file and slid it into the proper slot.
        The Furnace lighted.
        It was bright green.
        Liquid spilled into the forming tray beyond the thick viewplate above the womb.
        She punched the left knob straight down, rejecting the project. The liquid flesh was withdrawn from the forming tray and restored to the tank to await future creations. The identity wafer popped out of the slot and was replaced in the file.
        It had occurred to Belina that she might be able to resurrect the others on her own hook. The idiot had left the Olmescian amoeba curled toward the back of the machine, and everything was ready for use. If she had remembered anything from all those times she had set in a nutrient bath, watching Pertos create her comrades, now was the time to find out. And it appeared that she had learned and remembered well.
        At first, she had rejected the thought, for she could not see how a puppet could ever expect to become a puppet master. She was not as bound by rules and patterns of life as Sebastian was, though the concept was too large for her to absorb very quickly. Even Pertos would have balked at the suggestion that he might one day ascend into heaven and become a genuine god rather than a demi-god, guiding the fates of real men rather than the fates of puppets. The Furnace occupied a place of reverence in a puppet's view of things, and no simulacrum regarded the womb with less than a fear of the supernatural. For them, it was both heaven and hell. It was the void. It was the end, yet without an end, the beginning without a beginning. To take command of it seemed no more than egotistical folly that would terminate in some awful disaster.
        But when several days had passed without any other plan to take the place of this insane scheme, the insanity looked more pleasing, less ridiculous. She gradually lost her superstitious awe and embraced practicality in its stead. In that way, she was much like the Rogue Saint Eclesian, though she could not know about that.
        She had begun to read to the idiot, for she found that put him to sleep faster and deeper than anything but wine-and the wine was all gone. Tonight she had finally dared to go to the Furnace and test her skills. She knew the use of the controls and she knew the procedure for creation. And now she was more than a puppet, though she was not certain what or how much more.
        She stepped to the stool, clambered down it and crossed the floor to the snoring idiot. He looked immense, head nearly as huge as all of her. And in a few moments, little Belina would kill him, no matter how big he was. The thought exhilarated her.
        She found the scissors he had used to cut bandages for his hand, and she carried them across the cold metal floor to where he lay. They were terribly heavy, but though her arms ached with the burden she