The flesh in the furnace

pursuit of pleasure through the principal of pain. Many of the parents did not survive their young. Bitty Belina did. Wissa did. And but four others from the original thirty-seven.
        The new generations were not satisfied with the games of pain they played among themselves. Now that the Furnace was dead, they had all the city to roam through. They made use of the long-dormant computer and the other facilities available to them. In. time, they forged weapons, learned war and set forth against an unprotected Earth where the cities were named things like Springsun, and Fallingwater and Novembermoon, where men had grown rich and soft and somewhat bored. It was a one-sided battle.
        After Earth had been won, there were the stars. That took a while, for the puppets found much pain-pleasure on the motherworld to engage their interest for generations. Slowly, their stock of victims dwindled. In a century, they looked outward on blackness. And they went to it.
        No race fought with such brutality as did the puppets. No race could stir in them the terror they stirred in others. Worlds were abandoned before them. Life rippled outward through the galactic clusters in an attempt to leave the puppets behind. But they always followed in faster ships with better weapons. War, to other races, was a game, at most a very serious contest of wills. To the puppets, however, war was existence, the purpose of being.
        Perhaps even unto this day, the diminutive creatures might still be spilling through the void, tracking the shattered civilizations that fled from them. Fortunately, the Vonopoens had been able to create a special breed of warrior puppets with perfect fidelity to their masters. These were many-legged and many-armed spider beings who were turned loose on the puppets, drove them back, and finally crushed them completely.
        The spider-lizards, the Vonopoens, had built the puppets and sold them to human beings. The puppets had risen against their human master by the use of spiders. Eventually, they were defeated by another breed of scrambling, black arachnids made of the flesh in the Furnace.
        I wonder what the Rogue Saint Eclesian would have to say about such a chain of coincidences?
        
        The Vonopoen artisan drops the Holistian Pearl. It rolls across the stone floor of his warren and comes to rest against a golden tapestry.
        
        He stares at the white sphere a while, pondering the story it has told him. Then, shuffling hastily across the room to the shelf of books he keeps next to his drug bar, he takes down the Vonopoen Book of Wisdom which he has not read as much as he might wish, being more a man of the flesh than of the spirit. He turns to the gospels of the Rogue Saint, the only pages he has ever spent more than a few minutes with.
        
        He skims the text, flips pages.
        
        He finds what he searches for and reads it to himself as his stomach opens and closes on his belly, a sign that he has missed supper because of the Holistian Pearl's tale. Eclesian says:
        
        "We Vonopoens have long prided ourselves on what we think of as our highest artform, our realistic miniature puppets. We make them in our own images and in the images of animals and other races, and we have them perform for us. Perhaps if we spent less time playing gods in this respect and examined the universe more closely, we would discover that we are all only puppets ourselves, on a much greater scale. We have our scripts. There are repetitious cycles. And somewhere, 1 think, there are voices that laugh at us. Even at me."
        
        The Vonopoen artisan knows that Eclesian was ancient when that was written. Was, in fact, upon his deathbed. But he remembers the spiders and wonders. And wonders. For once, he is pleased that his own craft is something so simple and unimportant as weaving tapestries from stones and shells and setting them in vibration so they sing for a thousand years.
        
        And then he goes to eat supper.