"Forget birth. It is an illusion of the Moon. Her doing. Nothing is born. There is only change."

"If nothing is born, nothing can die." I watched Him for evidence of any chinks in His armor. There were plenty.

"Change can stop!" He shouted, clenching and releasing His fists so that blood squirted out between the fingers of His slick gloves.

"To stop change is in itself a change. A change in change."

That got to Him. He flung His arms around in wide, haphazard motions.

"Forget change! There is only Death! Death and nothing thereafter!"

"I'm alive," I said quietly. I waggled my fingers at Him just to prove it. "I was born. Plants and animals were killed, fed to me, and converted again into living substance. That's what life is-change. Death is change, but it too leads to life and birth. It's a never-ending-"

"Don't say it!"

He screamed and threw His hands in front of Him. The blood dripped from His elbows. He jerked His head so that the mirror dropped in front of His face.

I said casually, "I was only going to say that it was a cycle-"

"No!"

"Like a wheel."

He shrieked the most horrifying yell I'd ever heard. The blood on His gloves curdled.

I had Him on the run.

"Ever-turning," I continued, "around and round. Circular. No beginning, no end-"

He stumbled backward over a mountain of corpses. The sky reddened to the same hue as before. A breeze whipped up behind me, carrying a scent of pomegranates and apples.

"Stop!" He cried pathetically. "They're Mine! I keep them from the Wheel. I guard them from rebirth. Here, in My Land of Never-Change!"

"Even You," I said, "are part of the Wheel." I grew to match His height. The wind blew even stronger. "Gods are born, and They die. Their influence waxes and wanes. You have reached Your own particular end."

"No!" He shouted, seeming to shrink away from me. The blood on His hands dried to brownish streaks. The wind seemed not to push at either one of us, yet the top layer of bodies began to roll with its force. They bounced past our legs. He tried to grab for them, to hold on to them.

"No, no, no! You've invoked the Winds of Change!"

The skeletons and carcasses flew by in a blur. The Winds lifted them up into the red sky, where each one disintegrated slowly, beautifully. The infinite plain had been swept clean of Death. Somewhere on the sweet-smelling Winds rang the gentle sound of pentatonic chimes.

The blood on His arms and hands caked and flaked away. His black gloves peeled off to reveal smooth, hard, cadaverously white skin.

A hand with long green fingernails reached around from behind me to slap a golden sickle into my grasp. I threw it forward with all my might.

It sailed on the Winds to ram into His chest, where it stuck and slipped down an inch. Out of the gap flew a thousand butterflies of every color imaginable.

"I wanted peace," He whimpered, crying tears that dissolved His hard face. "Peace, not life-in-death."

He devolved. He became an ape, a reptile, a fish, a pile of bluegreen slop. From somewhere came His voice-astonished, but sad nonetheless. It was as if He had discovered something that had eluded Him for aeons. Something that He had discovered all too late.

"Not a circle," He mused. "A helix! An ascending helix!"

Behind me, far away, a woman laughed. Where the corpses once had lain, new things began to grow in abundance.

Amongst it all, the old grey man sat pining.

"Now whose brains have I got to pick?"

"There's always your own," I said.

Just about then, the missile hit us and blew the world into a billion flinders.

Everything exploded around me. I took a nosedive into a crater and buried my head in the mud.

Bullets cracked by overhead. Arrows flew back and forth. The lightning flash of a particle beam ionized the air a mile above the battle.

Someone tumbled into the hole to slide beside me. Mud covered Him from head to foot. One hand clutched a rifle. He grinned like a piano.

"We've almost got the sons of the Bitch now, eh, boy?"

He looked quite a few years younger than I. His calling me boy grated a bit.

"Almost got whom?" I asked politely.

The blinding green light of a high-energy laser sizzled across the lip of the crater. I didn't like it here. I wondered why He did.

"The enemy, boy. We've almost conquered the enemy!"

A boulder tumbled over us to land out of sight with a loud thump. Crossbow bolts ricocheted off it. A buzzbomb collided with a TIE fighter, destroying both. Some manner of plasma weapon beamed hot as the sun for an instant, descending on a town. Eerie screams howled from the outskirts.

"Glorious. Glorious!" He shouted.

"The death?"

"No-death is nothing. Destruction! The sudden change of a pound of gelignite into fire and gas. The house that's a home one moment and rubble the next. The man who changes from a walking, thinking being to a mass of gnarled, bleeding meat in the blink of an eye. Change. That's what you want, right?"

He thought He had me. Ideas raced through me like greyhounds after the elusive fake rabbit. He watched me.

"It's violent change," I said. "Unnatural."

He laughed with vicious delight. It was the sort of laugh one hears in psycho wards. "A hurricane is natural-and equally as violent."

"People try to minimize nature's destruction. In war, you increase it intentionally."

"By the use of science!" He yelled, tossing a hand grenade over the lip of the hole. "Better killing through chemistry!" The explosion shook mud loose from the walls of the crater. The air smelled of cordite and ozone.

"Science is value-free until it's applied," I said. A stone axe flew into the pit. I pointed at it. "An axe can fell a tree or murder a man. A drug can cure or kill. A blanket can warm or smother. There's not a thing in existence that can't be used for evil ends. Even change. War is change accelerated for the purpose of plunder and conquest. Trying to speed up the cy-"

"Say it and die!" He pointed the rifle at my head. Right between the eyes.

I raised my hands casually. "I've noticed that every war on record has had God on both sides. All sides. What's Your game? Divide and conquer?"

"And unite to rule. I'll always be the winner." He racked the action on the rifle to chamber a round. His aim returned to my forehead.

"Yet every time You win with one side, You lose with the other. The winner's faith is justified, but the loser's faith is diminished."

"It evens out," He said.

"Does it? Do You even gain a draw?" I sat back in the mud, lowering my hands to grasp the business end of a hookah that had appeared at my side. I took a puff, exhaled, eyed Him.

"If it evens out," I said, "why am I here with You now? Why do You retreat to any polylogical corner You can find? Why are You continuing to rely on Your two favorite tools-faith and force?"

"If you'd only trust me, I wouldn't have to force you."

I blew a cloud of smoke in His face. Whatever was in the hookah was good herb. "Your threat of force works only if I believe in Your power. Yet You refuse to provide evidence of Your power, asking me instead to believe the secondhand testimony of men dead for thousands of years. No holy book can serve as proof. I call Your bluff by demanding a demonstration of Your power. Which You refuse to provide unless I'm already convinced. With that scam, You lose every man or woman with the ability to think. And as history continues its ascending helix-"

"Shut up!" He screeched.

I didn't let it faze me. "Every contradiction, evasion, and betrayed promise becomes clearer and more evident to more and more people. You're losing-"