The thought faded under the insistent power of Bridget's spell. She faced north.

"Hail to Thee, corner of all Powers! Arianrhod of the Silver Wheel, Great Demeter, Persephone, Earth Mothers and Fates! Protectress! Guard our circle and witness our rite performed according to the ancient ways!"

Something scratched feebly on the other side of the cockpit hatch.

Bridget returned to the east, followed by Ann. The old woman performed a closing gesture at three points where the circles were supposed to be. She turned to Ann, kissing her on both cheeks.

"The circle is closed. Blessed be."

"Blessed be," Ann repeated.

They looked at me. "Blessed be," I said, rotating my eyes to gaze at Isadora.

She made a sour face and looked unimpressed. "Blessed be," she said finally, with about as much enthusiasm as a draftee taking his oath.

Bridget, undeterred, clasped her hands together to speak.

"Gracious Goddess and Queen of the Heavens, Eternal Mother and Sister, Maiden Diana, Queen Isis, Mighty Hecate-bless these tools of your once and future Craft. Bless this circle and all inside it."

The scrabbling at the hatch grew louder. It sounded like a dog scratching to be let in. The others acted as if they didn't hear it. Was I hallucinating already?

"Bring your presence near to us that we may gather in your teachings."

The old witch gazed coolly at me, at the Theta Wave Amplifier, at the hypodermic airgun Velcroed to the altar.

"This is a spell of Dispersal, of Uncrossing. For thousands of years has the hand of the Usurper held Your world in his dark grip. Destroying beauty, crushing love, calling evil all that is good and calling good all that is evil. The will of the Usurper has acted through men to smash Your laws and ancient Harmonies, to twist Your design into senseless agony and endless suffering.

"We have been murdered and burned and made to live in misery, yet never have we let Your light die out, as never has Your face turned away from us even in our darkest nights.

"And now has come the time when the greatest of all Your crafts, the Craft of Science, shall aid in setting us free. From its beginnings in the split from alchemy and astrology, Science has ever been in conflict with the Usurper. Have not the servants of this newest of Crafts been denounced and burned alongside us? We have both been unknowing allies in this ancient struggle. Only now have we United, we who are mightier than the Usurper, as Love is mightier than hate, as the Creatrix is mightier than the destroyer, as She who gives birth is mightier than he who gives death. The two halves are whole again. The Battle is begun.

"So mote it be!"

Ann lifted the hypogun from the altar and reached through a small gap in the web. She pressed the business end of it against my carotid artery and squeezed the trigger. It made a sound like someone spitting. I hardly had time to feel the sting before my senses were overrun by a dreamy, rushing sensation.

The scraping at the hatch had become impossibly loud. Ann punched two or three more loads of mixed drugs into me, though I doubted my ability to count after the first one. I tried to tell Ann about the holes being torn in the hatch. A hideous yellow light like blazing jaundice glowed through the claw slashes in the plating.

Ann switched on the Theta Wave Amplifier. It glowed in whirling colors that stabbed my eyes like lasers. I tried to reach for the helmet to remove it, but the Witch's Cradle held me with unyielding resistance.

I stared at Isadora. The drugs and the theta wave amplification intensified my ability to interact telepathically with her. She was totally open to me. Every portion of her mind and heart and soul and dreams were spread out before me like some sort of psychological buffet. I knew her inside out.

And she knew me.

I ached with her through the yearnings of her body and the censure of her parents. She cried through my hollow childhood, devoid of wonder. I trembled at her elders' insistence on pure mental achievements. She wept under my parents' mockery of anything that inspired awe or evoked worship. Together we fought. I worshipped justice, and she reached the physical through her mind. We conquered and overcame.

The cockpit hatchway exploded inward. I plunged into darkness as a thousand daggers pierced through me.

I stood naked and alone on a vast, empty plain under a red sky upon which no sun shone.

I waited. I knew God would arrive soon.

I waited and waited and wondered and waited. And just when I was sure God wouldn't show up He didn't show up.

I started to walk.

Not having any idea where I was going, I wasn't sure when I got there. When I got there, though, to another arid part of the featureless expanse, the ground began to slope. Not just part of the ground. The whole infinite plain. It was as if the whole world were turning edgewise.

The soles of my feet began to slide, kicking up dust clouds that rolled and fell with me. I flopped over on my backside and slid forward, still gazing at a distant horizon.

The plain tilted more and more. The feeling of down was no longer down, but more toward the horizon. Bouncing and rolling, I tried to grip the dirt that crumbled beneath my fingers. Skin tore away from me in chunks and sheets.

I screamed. It was a hollow, muted sound, as if I were inside a coffin.The plain slanted vertically now. I fell straight down its side, my fingers snapping off and breaking away with every grasp I made. The pull of gravity (or whatever it was) angled another degree.

I fell away from the desert into the featureless carnelian sky.

I fell for hours. Days, though there was no period of darkness. The plain stretched above me as I fell farther away.

I counted my heartbeats. Aside from the rush of air, it was the only sound I heard. When I reached 443,557 beats, I hit a swarm of razor blades. Slices and strips of flesh tore away from me and continued to fall. The plain looked as huge and uncurving as ever, though I must have been thousands of miles "up." A red haze of blood fell with me, a screaming ruby comet.

Then I hit.

Pain exploded inside me as the spikes I'd landed on punched through my body. One went straight through my skull with a sickening crunch. I crossed my eyes, focusing on something yellowish-grey that dangled at the tip of a slimy red cone.

"You've made your point!" I shouted, the spikes through my lungs aspirating my voice into a raspy wheeze. "Show yourself so we can get on with it!"

There was no sound other than the slow dripping of my blood. I stood, pulling myself up off the barbs. Gobbets of my own skin and muscle lay about here and there where they had landed. I picked them up and placed them in torn folds of flesh that served as pockets.

Something looked strange about the ground on which I stood. The spikes grew out of small depressions in the surface. It looked unsettlingly familiar. Especially the salmon-pink color of the flesh.

A giant hand darted out of infinity at an impossible speed to seize me between a thumb and finger of planetary dimensions. Crushing pain steamrolled across me. The immense digits rolled my body around like a ball of snot; after ages of grinding, twisting agony, the fingers separated.

Across a million-mile chasm, bridged by an arm thicker than worlds, I stared at my quarry face to face.

His hair had been styled in a crew cut. I had never imagined that God would look like Jack Webb.

"I love you," bellowed a voice that rumbled deeper than earthquakes.

He had some way of showing his affection, having smeared my body across a good portion of his index finger. Stinging anguish cried from every particle of ruined flesh.