"I don't ever want to hear that name again," a tech grumbled.

"You mustn't confuse God with what you've just seen," Landis admonished.

"Hey, come on!" Hans said. "She moved time backwards or something. I saw it myself. This place exploded-doesn't that prove something?"

Landis grinned, reached out to ruffle his hair. "Sometimes I worry about you, Hans. You have an awfully small concept of God." Several of the drinkers laughed.

He blushed, said, "No, really."

"Well, I'll try to keep this"- she leaned forward, rapped her mug against the rock, "fill this up again, hey?-keep it simple. We had analysts crawl up and down Coral's descrip­tion of the universe, and did you know there was no place in it anywhere for such things as mercy, hope, faith? No, we got an amalgam of substrates, supraprograms, and self-metaediting physics. Now what makes God superior to us is not just intellect-we've all known some damn clever bastards. And it's not just power, or I could go and buy an atomic device on the black market and start my own religion.

"No, by definition God is my moral superior. Now I myself am but indifferently honest-but to Coral, moral con­siderations don't even exist. Get it?''

Only Elin noticed the haunted, hopeless light in Landis's eyes or realized that she was spinning words effortlessly, without conscious control. Deep within, the woman was caught in a private crisis of faith.

"Yeah, I guess." Hans scratched his head. "I'd still like to know just what happened between her and Tory there at the end."

"I can answer that," a wetware tech said. The others turned to face her, and she smirked, the center of attention. "What the hell, they plant the censor blocks in us all tomorrow-this is probably my only chance to talk about it.

"We reviewed all the tapes, and found that the original problem stemmed from a basic design flaw. Shostokovich should never have brought his ego along. The God state is very ego-threatening; he couldn't accept it. His mind twisted it, denied it, made it into a thing of horror. Because to accept it would mean giving up his identity." She paused.

"Now we don't understand the why or how of what hap­pened. But what was done is very clearly recorded. Coral came along and stripped away his identity."

"Hogwash!" Landis was on her feet, belligerent and un­steady. "After all that happened, you can't say they don't have any identity! Look at the mess that Coral made to join Tory to her-that wasn't the work of an unfeeling, identity-free creature."

"Our measurements showed no trace of identity at all," the tech said in a miffed tone.

"Measurements! Well, isn't that just scientific as all get-out?" The priest's face was flushed with drunken anger. "Have any of you clowns given any thought to just what we've created here? This gestalt being is still young-a newborn infant. Someday it's going to grow up. What happens to us all when it decides to leave the island, hey? I-" She stopped, her voice trailing away. The drinkers were silent, had all drawn away from her.

" 'Scuse me," she muttered. "Too much wine." And sat.

"Well." Hans cleared his throat, quirked a smile. "Any­body for refills?"

The crowd came back to life, a little too boisterous, too noisily, determinedly cheerful. Watching from the fringes, outside the circle of light, Elin had a sudden dark fantasy, a walking nightmare.

A desk tech glanced her way. He had Tory's eyes. When he looked away, Tory smiled out of another's face. The drinkers shifted restlessly, chattering and laughing, like danc­ers pantomiming a party in some light opera, and the eyes danced with them. They flitted from person to person, materi­alizing now here, now there, surfacing whenever an individ­ual chanced to look her way.

She heard a quiet voice say, "We were fated to be lovers."

Go away, go away, go away, Elin thought furiously, and the hallucination ceased.

After a moment spent composing herself, Elin quietly slipped around to where Landis sat. "I'm leaving in the morning," she said. The new persona had taken; they would not remove her facepaint until just before the lift up, but that was mere formality. She was cleared to leave.

Landis looked up, and for an instant the woman's doubt and suffering were writ plain on her face. Then the mask was back, and she smiled. "Just stay away from experimental religion, hey kid?" They hugged briefly. "And remember what I told you about stubbing your toes."

There was one final temptation to be faced. Sitting in the hut, Tory's terminal in her lap, Elin let the soothing green light of its alphanumerics wash over her. She thought of Tory, of his lean body under hers in the pale blue earthlight. "We were meant to be lovers," he'd said. She thought of life without him.

The terminal was the only artifact Tory had left behind that held any sense of his spirit. It had been his plaything, his diary, and his toolbox, and its memory still held the Trojan horse programs he had been working with when he was-transformed.

One of those programs, she knew, would make her a god.

She stared up through the ivy at the domed sky. Only a few stars were visible between the black silhouetted leaves, and these winked off and on with the small movements she made breathing. She thought back to Coral's statement that Elin would soon join her, merging into the unselfed, autistic state that only Tory's meddling had spared her.

"God always keeps her promises," Tory said quietly.

Elin started, looked down, and saw that the grass to the far side of the hut was moving, flowing. Swiftly it formed the familiar, half-amused, half-embittered features of her lover, continuing to flow until all of his head and part of his torso rose Up from the floor.

She was not half so startled as she would have liked to be. Of course the earlier manifestations of Tory had been real, not phantoms thrown up by her grief. They were simply not her style.

Still, Elin rose to her feet apprehensively. "What do you want from me?"

The loam-and-grass figure beckoned. "Come. It is time you join us."

"I am not a program," Elin whispered convulsively. She backed away from the thing. "I can make my own decisions!"

She turned and plunged outside, into the fresh, cleansing night air. It braced her, cleared her head, returned to her some measure of control.

A tangle of honeysuckle vines on the next terrace wall up moved softly. Slowly, gently, they became another manifes­tation, of Coral this time, with blossoms for the pupils of her eyes. But she spoke with Tory's voice.

"You would not enjoy godhood," he said, "but the being you become will."

"Give me time to think!" she cried. She wheeled and strode rapidly away, out of the residential cluster, through a scattering of boulders, and into a dark meadow.

There was a quiet kind of peace here, and Elin wrapped it about her.

She needed that peace, for she had to decide between her humanity and Tory. It should have been an easy choice, but-the pain of being without.

Elin stared up at the earth; it was a world full of pain. If she could reach out and shake all the human misery loose, it would flood all of creation, extinguishing the stars and poi­soning the space between.

There was, if not comfort, then a kind of cold perspective in that, in realizing that she was not alone, that she was merely another member of the commonality of pain. It was the heritage of her race. And yet-somehow-people kept on going.

If they could do it, so could she.

Some slight noise made her look back at the boulder field. Tory's face was appearing on each of the stones, every face slightly different, so that he gazed upon her with a dozen expressions of love. Elin shivered at how alien he had be­come. "Your need is greater than your fear," he said, the words bouncing back and forth between faces. "No matter what you think now, by morning you will be part of us."