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" `In Rome they live, in Athens, in all cities of the Empire, these
rogues hearken to no laws of right and wrong and use their powers for
their own ends.
"`Ana they died horribly in the heat and the flame just as did the gods
in the groves and the sanctuaries, and if any have survived they
probably do not even guess why they were subjected to the killing
flame, of how the Mother and the Father were put into the sun.'
"He had stopped. "
" He was studying my reaction. The library was quiet and if the
others prowled behind the walls, I couldn't hear them anymore.
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" `I don't believe a word of it,' I said.
"He stared at me in stupefied silence for a moment and then he
laughed and laughed.
"In a rage, I left the library and went out through the temple rooms
and up through the tunnel and into the street. "
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"This was very uncharacteristic of me, to leave in temper, to break off
abruptly and depart. I had never done that sort of thing when I was a
mortal man. But as I've said, I was on the edge of madness, the first
madness many of us suffer, especially those who have been brought
into this by force.
"I went back to my little house near the great library of Alexandria,
and I lay down on my bed as if I could really let myself fall asleep there
and escape from this thing.
"`Idiot nonsense,' I murmured to myself.
"But the more I thought about the story, the more it made sense. It
made sense that something was in my blood impelling me to drink
more blood. It made sense that it heightened all sensations, that it
kept my body-a mere imitation now of a human body- functioning
when it should have come to a stop. And it made sense that this thing
had no mind of its own but was nevertheless a power, an organization
of force with a desire to live all its own.
"And then it even made sense that we could all be connected to the
Mother and the Father because this thing was spiritual, and had no
bodily limits except the limits of the individual bodies in which it had
gained control. It was the vine, this thing, and we were the flowers,
scattered over great distances, but connected by the twining tendrils
that could reach all over the world.
"And this was why we gods could hear each other so well, why I
could know the others were in Alexandria, even before they called to
me. It was why they could come and find me in my house, why they
could lead me to the secret door.
"All right. Maybe it was true. And it was an accident, this melding of
an unnamed force and a human body and mind to make the New
Thing as the Elder had said.
"But still-I didn't like it.
"I revolted against all of it because if I was anything, I was an
individual, a particular being, with a strong sense of my own rights
and prerogatives. I could not realize that I was host to an alien entity.
I was still Marius, no matter what had been done to me.
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"I was left finally with one thought and one thought only: if I was
connected to this Mother and Father then I must see them, and I must
know that they were safe. I could not live with the thought that I
could die at any moment on account of some alchemy I could neither
control nor understand.
"But I didn't return to the underground temple. I spent the next few
nights feasting on blood until my miserable thoughts were drowned in
it, and then in the early hours I roamed the great library of Alexandria,
reading as I had always done.
"Some of the madness dissolved in me. I stopped longing for my
mortal family. I stopped being angry at that cursed thing in the cellar
temple, and I thought rather of this new strength I possessed. I would
live for centuries: I would know the answers to all kinds of questions. I
would be the continual awareness of things as time passed! And as
long as I slew only the evildoer, I could endure my blood thirst, revel
in it, in fact. And when the appropriate time came, I would make my
companions and make them well.
"Now what remained? Go back to the Elder and find out where he
had put the Mother and the Father. And see these creatures for
myself. And do the very thing the Elder had threatened, sink them so
deep into the earth that no mortal could ever find them and expose
them to the light.
"Easy to think about this, easy to imagine them as so simply
dispatched.
"Five nights after I'd left the Elder, when all these thoughts had had
time to develop in me, I lay resting in my bedroom, with the lamps
shining through the sheer bed curtains as before. In filtered and
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