He stepped up to me closer than even most Europeans stand when talking to one another. His breath smelled of fish and Binaca.

"The desire to murder God is an almost universal emotion in human beings. If you succeed in destroying their God for them, if you show them it can be done, you will create two disastrous consequences.

"First, you will destroy man's desire to achieve, which is his only metaphorical means of killing God and maintaining his self-respect. Every man wants to be God, and every man labors in his own way to unseat Him. Second, you will eliminate guilt. More accurately, you will remove the means by which we are able to instill guilt in manour only means to channel the God-killing urge toward productive ends."

He concluded, dramatically ponderous: "Killing God would destroy civilization."

I grunted unsympathetically. "Killing God would put you jokers out of business. That's all."

"Quite so." The Cardinal smiled. "Where would man go to be absolved of his sins if we weren't around to define what was sin? We would descend into violence and corruption."

"I see. In other words, we wouldn't be in our current state of peace and bliss."

"Things would be far worse, I assure you."

I rubbed an itch on my nose. "I'd like to see the results and judge for myself. If things go from bad to worse, we can always resurrect Him, right?"

"Bah!" The Mahatma pounded a fist against the arm of the couch. "None of you make a living absolving the sins of those who truly harm others, such as murderers and thieves. There are too few of them." He looked at me with black eyes buried in glossy olive-hued skin. "The religions you see represented by the Ecclesia-"

"As you call it," The Cardinal took care to interject.

"-have succeeded in transforming the act of living into a sin!"

Ah, I thought, dissension in the ranks. Good.

The Rabbi smiled conspiratorially at The Ayatollah. "We tell them they are evil for wanting too much. We tell them it is wrong to eat what they want, we tell them it is wrong to make love to whom they wish when they wish. They cannot question, for we say that the orders come from gee-dash-dee. Some of us here"-he glanced at the guy in red-"have even accomplished the laudable feat of damning everyone merely for being born."

The Cardinal smiled with pride.

I leaned over Isadora to whisper in her ear.

"Think you can handle the whole gang at once?"

She looked at me as if I'd asked her to jump over the moon.

"All of them?" She thought about it. "The only time I tried more than one was these Siamese twins who-"

"No details, kid. Did it work?"

She nodded. "Sort of. I don't know about this many."

The Cardinal cleared his throat. "We are prepared to be either generous or brutal, Mr. Ammo. Please consider wisely, since, the event of a negative answer, we cannot permit you to leave this room ali-"

Fatso's face went slack, his gaze focused on some distant realm. The others mimicked him a second or so later.

Beathan fell back against the wall to slide down to the floor. They went as limp as rag dolls all over.

Well, almost all over.

I retrieved Beathan's neural interruptor and pointed it at him. His glassy eyes registered no emotion.

"Ann," I whispered loudly, "I think she's got them."

Ann emerged from the closet to gaze at Isadora. The kid sat on the edge of the fireplace, staring equally as blankly as the men she held entranced.

"Might as well sit down," I said. "We can't leave without her, so we've got to wait till she's finished."

"That could take hours."

"Time passes faster in her little world." I nodded toward the Ecclesia. "See?"

Several of the holy men began squirming about. Their dull, low moans were the sounds you'd hear from the depths of any mental hospital. Their pelvic motions increased in speed. The Mahatma and The Ayatollah slid jerkingly to the carpet, their sight turned inward.

Isadora shook with fury or pain or terror. Tears started to run. She cried out once and fell to the hearthstones, trembling. When I knelt at her side, she reached up to grasp my neck.

"Let's get out. Please." Her words barely made it from her to me.

I picked her up. I had no experience in calming a wounded child, so I did the only thing I knew how to do-I let her cry.

"It was awful. Awful. They hated me for being a girl and they told me they wouldn't fuck me because I was a girl and unclean and I had filthy thoughts and I wasn't a virgin in my heart so they-they c-cut me up…"

She buried her face in the nook of my arm just as before and sobbed. The wet heat of her breath and tears soaked right through my jacket.

Ann fumbled in her purse. She stepped over to the esteemed members of the Ecclesia, who lay there with closed eyes and twisted, peaceful smiles.

"Let's go," I said. The place felt like a charnel house. A musky stench ambushed my nostrils.

She ignored me and the thirty kilos of kid I was trying to keep from dropping. She drew her pigsticker from its sheath and advanced on the man in red.

"In this sign," she said, "be conquered." She carved a five-pointed star in his forehead. Deep. The knife edged down to cut off the tip of his nose.

I hadn't thought her the vengeful sort. I really would have stopped her if I hadn't had my hands full. I resorted to the sternest form of moral persuasion.

"Why not just shoot them in the crotch and be done with it?"

She reached up under The Rabbi's curly hair to nick off a slice of his ear. "For your Abodah Zarah," she said to his sleeping visage. A trickle of blood snaked though his dark locks.

On The Ayatollah's cheekbone she inscribed something in swirling Arabic. "In the name of Al Lat!" She nearly hissed the words.

"Let's go!" I wasn't interested in skin decoration.

She turned to join me at the door. Her gaze was as blank and distant as theirs had been. She wiped her blade on Beathan's frock and returned it to her bag without looking. Her hand reached out to touch Isadora's head.

I waited for her to say something symbolic and important. Maybe even something comforting.

Her hand slid away silently, wearily, to drop at her side. She followed me out without a word.

The promotional campaign was causing a riot among the press. Speculative articles spread through the tabloids like mold through Roquefort. Editorials canted about the decaying morality that could culminate in such a mockery of All Things Sacred. Some of the more apocalyptic magazines and TV programs nailed our plan dead on. Hallelujah House was particularly unkind in their characterization of whomever was behind it all.

All of which only helped circulate the awareness of the plan. The new Zeitgeist spread almost without our help.

Kathleen intensified the program to include computerized telephone spotcalls, bulk-rate mailings, and skytyped messages over football games. The one above Notre Dame nearly instigated a riot.

Christmas approached with all the pleasantness of a funeral procession. Priests and ministers implicated our campaign with the international Satanist/Communist/Corporate/Secular Humanist conspiracy. Rabbis, imams, and assorted shamans hinted that only the Christian God would die on the Christian New Year. The Brahmans sat quietly knowing-or pretending to. The nut cults came farther out of the woodwork.

I asked Kathleen to stick an ad in newspapers and magazines soliciting funds "to halt the God-killer's campaign of lies and deceit". The money it brought in went right out again for ads for both sides.

I spent most of my time in the library. If I could have injected the books into a vein, I would have been mainlining religious philosophy. The current stack of books included Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, C. S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, and Thomas Paine. I had Paine's Age of Reason in hand. He detested organized religions on the grounds that revelation could not be received secondhand. On that basis, he denounced the Bible as mere hearsay. That he promoted his own deistic, disorganized religion didn't prevent me from unearthing information that I found generally useful.