Dagon (14 page)

He recognized the god Dagon.

An idiot. The god was omnipotent but did not possess intelligence. Dagon embodied a naked will uncontrollable. The omnipotent god was merely stupid.

Peter laughed, his teeth shone in the dark.

He confronted the god. The presence of Dagon displaced time, as a stone displaces water in a dish. Surely hours elapsed in the stare that was between them.

Merely a ruptured idiot stubby reptile.

The god Dagon went away. Suddenly winked out; whisked.

At last Peter relaxed. He smiled in the dark. He had faced the incomprehensible manifesta­tion and he still maintained himself; he was still Peter Leland. He blinked his eyes gratefully, casually turned his head from the altar. He heard Mina coming and turned to face the door, still smiling in the dark, uncaring and relaxed. She opened the flimsy door and entered without hesitation. In her right hand she bore Coke Rymer's man-thing, faintly gleaming. She took a handful of his hair in her left hand and Peter knelt forward on his knees and raised his head. Happily he bared his throat for the knife.

SIX

Peter Leland died and came through death to a new mode of existence. He did not forget his former life, and now he understood it. The new vantage point of his psyche was an undefined bright space from which he could look back upon this little spot of earth and there see the shape of his life in terms not bitterly limited by misery and fear. At his death he did not relin­quish the triumphant grasp of his identity he had acquired in encountering Dagon face to face. He had come through. In this surrounding brightness there was no time, and he watched his career unfold itself again and again beneath him and he laughed, without rancor and with­out regret. Now his whole personality was a be­nevolent clinical detachment.

He understood suffering now and the purpose of suffering. In an almost totally insentient cos­mos only human feeling is interesting or rel­evant to what the soul searches for. There is nothing else salient in the whole tract of limit­less time, and suffering is simply one means of carving a design upon an area of time, of charg­ing with human meaning each separate mo­ment of time. Suffering is the most expensive of human feelings, but it is the most intense and most precious of them, because suffering most efficiently humanizes the unfeeling universe. Not merely the shape of his own life taught him this, but the history of all lives, for from here he perceived with a dispassionate humor the whole of human destiny.

Metaphor amused him—and this was neces­sary, for in this place metaphor was a part of substance. Here he had no properly physical form apart from metaphor. And now it seemed his task to find and take his likeness in every possible form in the universe; he was to become a kind of catalogue of physical existence and of the gods. There were metaphors for everything: sometimes all his past life appeared to him in the image of a gleaming snail track over a damp garden walk; or a black iron cube, two inches square; or a shred of discolored cuticle; or a frayed shoelace.

No regret and no anger in him, no nostalgia for the painful limits he had metamorphosed out of. He was filled with an unrepressed motiveless benevolence. He contemplated with joy the unity of himself and what surrounded him. He deliberated what form his self should take now, thinking in a tuneless dreaming fashion of every possible guise. Galactic ages must have passed before he finally gave over and took the form of Leviathan. Peter took the form of the great fish, a glowing shape some scores of light-years in length. He was filled with calm; and joyfully bel­lowing, he wallowed and sported upon the rich darkness that flows between the stars.

END