Yes, he’s made a mistake of some sort. My ego hasn’t gone away as planned. Instead of leaving only a perfect copying template behind — a healthy root substrate for his diseased soul to graft onto — my sense of selfness seems to grow and expand with each passing minute, in ways that no longer seem painful but more akin to voluptuous bliss.

And for the first time it occurs to me … this may not be a bad thing. In fact -

In fact, I’m starting to wonder. Who is in the best position to exploit this magnificent glazier, when it finally attains full power? Its inventor? The one who understands the theory?

Or the one who dwells within the ever-growing Standing Wave? The one who makes it possible by virtue of raw duplicating talent? The one who, you might say, was born for it?

Hey, theoretical understanding is overrated. Anyway, as we/I amplify, grow, and spread, I can start to feel Maharal’s knowledge, like a riffling breeze of index cards, all aflurry nearby, close enough to reach out and access -

Who says he should be the rider and I the steed?

Why not the other way around?

It’s kind of hard to move about when half of you has fallen off or broken down.

Crushed and burned, shrunken and diminished, I had only partial function in one leg to help me haul myself upward along the fuselage of the skycycle, perching next to its cockpit, leaning in to fumble at whatever buttons I could reach. I was trying for the radio, to transmit a general distress call. But after a few encouraging bloops and beeps and instrument flashes, what I somehow triggered was the autopilot!

“Emergency escape procedure activated,” a voice announced, loud enough to make out through seared and blasted ears. My torso felt a rumble as the engine reignited. “Closing canopy. Prepare for lift.”

I was still dazed and muddled from the nightmare ride that brought me here, so it took a couple of seconds to realize — or notice the glass bubble swinging down. I managed to pull my head back in time, but not my left arm, which got pinned in that moment of indecision.

Damn! I was used to pain by then, but this crushing sensation was ghastly as the transparent canopy tried to squeeze shut. For some reason it didn’t sense my arm was in the way. A malfunction? Or did Beta program the unit not to care about trivial clay limbs when a quick getaway was at stake? All I could do — while the lift ducts sandblasted grit into the air — was send commands for my trapped left hand to keep stabbing buttons, hoping to shut it off.

Instead, my efforts gave the Harley conniptions! It bucked and jittered, with each jerk tearing agonizingly at my arm as the glass bubble tried to close. Why couldn’t the idiot machine sense that no one was aboard! Perhaps it also served Beta as a pilotless courier, conveying small objects, like severed heads.

What little feeling I had in my left leg sensed the ground’s queasy departure. I was flying again!

More buttons and switches fell before my chopping hand, which kept swinging long after an organic arm would have nerves and circulation pinched off. All the clay version needed was some residual connection for me to order a splurge of all its remaining élan. The limb flung wildly, seeking things to twist and pull, until the canopy’s steady guillotine pressure finally tore through.

The weight of my body did the rest. I looked down -

— about fifteen or twenty meters, almost straight down to the roof of Maharal’s cabin.

Frantically twisting during my plummet, I managed to strike the shingles first with my useless right leg.

Did you ever have that feeling of viewing life through the wrong end of a telescope? Everything from the moment of impact seemed to happen in a fog of dulled senses — the noise and jarring force were distant things, happening to someone else. Even time felt softened as another of those eerie otherness waves came over me. I could swear the substance of that termite-eaten roof dissolved as I passed right through, floating toward the floor amid cottony clouds of splinters, dust, insects, and other debris.

Landing on my back, I heard an awful thud. But other senses disagreed. To touch, it felt like rebounding off the surface tension of a soap bubble, hardly jarring at all. An illusion, of course, for I could tell that more chunks of me had broken off.

Bottomed out at last, I stared up at a ragged circle of sky — rimmed by still-crumbling rafters. Soon the dust haze cleared enough to glimpse Beta’s poor skyscooter almost directly overhead, brighter but more frantic than the surrounding stars. Flaming extravagantly, the damaged machine fought to right itself, then turned laboriously to head off. Westward, I guessed from a glimpse of Sagittarius, and from the orientation of the cabin walls. A good choice, if you’re trying to get help … or to be destroyed.

Speaking of destruction, I saw little option but to write off this particular branching of the multilimbed life tree of one Albert Morris. Tiredness didn’t begin to describe how I felt. What little of me could feel anything at all.

There was no “salmon urge” anymore. Just the siren song of slurry … the beckoning of the recycling bin, calling me to rejoin the great clay circle, in confident hope that my physical substance may yet find some better use, in a luckier ditto.

But not one who’s seen or done more with its life, I thought, finding consolation. It had been interesting, the last few days. I had few regrets.

Except that Clara will never hear the whole story …

Yeah. That was too bad, I agreed.

… and now the bad guys will win.

Aw, man. Whatever nagging inner voice had to put in that last bit? What guilt-tripping nag? If I could, I’d tear it out! Just shut up and let me die, I groused.

You gonna just lie there and let ’em get away with it?

Crap. I didn’t have to take this from some obsessive soul corner of a cheap-model golem who was misborn a frankie … became a ghost … and any moment was about to graduate to melting corpse.

Who’s a corpse? Speak for yourself.

Stunning wit, that triple irony. Speak for myself, indeed. And though I tried hard to ignore the little voice, something surprising happened. My right hand and arm moved, lifting slowly till five trembling fingers came within sight of my good eye. Then my left leg twitched. Without conscious command, but reacting to imprinted habits a million years old, they started cooperating with each other, fumbling to shift my weight, then pushing to turn me over.

Oh well. Might as well help.

As I’ve said, Albert was always pigheaded, obstinate, persistent — and I guess that endearing trait came through on Tuesday morning when he made me, rolling his soul into this inert doll and willing it to move … with much the same sanguine hopefulness as ancient Sumerian scribes who long ago held that each clay impression manifested something sacred and magical. A brief but potent shove back against the surrounding darkness.

So I crawled, using one arm and a half-usable leg to haul what was left of me past broken furniture and tattered western-motif rugs, through an open door with a shattered lock and then over fresh footprints that led down a long, dusty hallway — a corridor that seemed to push right into the mountain. Following Beta.

What else could I do, since it seemed quite clear that I was too stubborn to die?