The flesh in the furnace

from it as whiteness flowed in. In moments, it was storing the energy to carry on its life functions, and a moment later he had given it more than it could hold. It used the incoming excess of energy to play its own role in this symbiosis. Through the nerves in the tips of his fingers, it flushed a distortion throughout his body, sent him into synathesia where all senses were confused, where sight came as smell and sound as pictures. The Pearl fired alien images in his brain, plunged him through the heart of a star and into even stranger places where it had been in its eternity of existence.
        The Pearl had had a thousand masters in its life to date, and now it drew on all their experiences, all the scenes and events it had shared while in their possession. It touched filaments of power along the surface of Pertos' brain, stepped up the vividness of the dreams and took him across the universe in the bodies of half a dozen races, in half a hundred strange spaceships, through half a thousand points of wonder.
        And he accepted.
        
        For a while, he forgot that he was a god of sorts and tha doom would follow genesis. There was a large audience for the first night's two performances. Every seat in the auditorium was filled, three thousand paying customers in all. Those seated too far to either side or toward the last half of the hall had raised the folding telescopic windowplates on the backs of the seats before them and were watching the magnified stage and the drawn, emerald curtain with childlike anticipation.
        The robotic orchestra played something of RimskiKorsakov's, cymbals crashing and drums growing ominous, then flutes and piccolos bursting forth with sign that fairness and good still existed in the black scene the music painted.
        Sebastian peeked through the curtains again and again, watching the patrons, carrying an excitement that came only with a performance. If the combination of dress styles from a hundred worlds looked strange out there, Sebastian didn't notice. It was not the clothes, but the people that excited him. So many people, so close, all there for the puppets he helped bring them.
        He closed the gap in the curtain and turned to look over the puppets who stood together, talking, perhaps working over their lines. He had always wondered what the puppets talked about when they were together, alone, but he could ', never fathom what it might be. Pertos said they sometimes I, dreamed of escape, though they could never go farther from the Furnace than a thousand yards without suffering an excruciating, unendurable pain that eventually forced them back where they belonged.
        Bitty Belina was looking very earnest, her little brow wrinkled, her eyes set and sparkling, her lips moving steadily, almost as if in ritual cadence, repeating some charm or magic spell.
        Suddenly she turned and faced Sebastian, and in his mind, there was blood pumping out of her stomach and she was not Bitty Belina any more, but a girl named jenny. And he gurgled and looked away from her, blinking, crying, but no longer remembering what had stirred him so deeply. The flash of memory was gone. Jenny? Just a name.
        "Where is Master Godelhausser?" she asked Sebastian.
        Her voice, though small, was not tinny. It did not screech or whine as she spoke. It was a womanly voice in the sense that some little girls, when breathless, sound very adult and somehow sensuous.
        Sebastian waved his arms, pointing nowhere, and finally managed to say, "With the lights. As always."
        His throat ached, as if each one of the sharp-edged words had torn chunks of flesh loose on their way from his body to Bitty Belina. He coughed, dry and racking, making his eyes water.
        She had her tiny hands on her hips now. Her white, mid-thigh skirt rustled as if made of paper, and it thrust out stiffly over the pert curve of her small buttocks. "Damn him! He promised us we'd have a new ending in the script, like we want, and then he disappears before he comes throughl"
        "New ending?" Sebastian asked. He could not understand what she meant, for the story of Bitty Belina was a permanent cycle with him, and the notion that it could be changed was alien and unfathomable. One might as well say the sun will rise in the north and settle in the east or that cows will now fly and birds will give milk henceforth.
        "We don't want Wissa killed in the end,"