"Elaine Grant?"

She nodded happily.

"Drink." She kept nodding at nothing and the sway of her soaked hair as she brushed it behind her ears reminded me of her brother.

"It is from the Well."

"Where are the labs?"

"Labs?" Her mouth couldn't completely close, her sublime grin holding it open like that of a fish.

"Drink from the Well."

"Where is the Well?"

"Drink."

"Is there a Well?"

"Drink."

"Where do you draw your water?"

"From the Well."

"Elaine, most other G.o.ds allow for light conversation.

Consider that point."

I grabbed the jug, took a sip, and could taste the high nutrient content and sweet recombinant DNA agents immediately trying to change my genomes at the first base pair, I chuckled and shook my head-they were going all out this time, no fooling around.

All eighty thousand genes abruptly started shifting sequences in the three billion chemical base pairs that make up human genome DNA, altering the long protein strands from the beginning to end. The Children of the Well weren't waiting tens of thousands of years the way they had changed humanity before with the introduction of each new faith. Asians, the Middle Eastern faiths, Mayans, Africans, Native Americans, Egyptians, even the lost Anasazi and Incas and Roanoke Settlement--with each new belief came a little more dabbling into genetics, and a slightly altered new human race.

I allowed the virus to run its course and could feel the changes the Tenfew were attempting to effect: an enlarging of the thalamus in the diencephalon, which would function as a tighter link between the psyche and the soma-body. Greater conduction of neural axon impulses: the water had to be nutrient-heavy because these people wouldn't care much for eating. A modification from twelve pairs of nerves on the undersurface of the brain to fifteen. Less muscle tone in specific areas of the body, especially the face. It was difficult to frown or look pensive. Tear ducts shrank-less crying, less ability to show fear or sadness. I'd been wrong: Schaffer's nanotech virus hadn't destroyed Jeffy Grant's intelligence. The Children of the Well had already stolen most of it.

"Nice touch," I whispered, and the a.s.sa.s.sin's hands snapped shut and shattered the jug. What bitter tricks.

"Is there a garden?" I asked her.

She wanted to look angry about the broken jug but couldn't pull it off with the weakened muscles of her blissful visage, so she pointed to the east and strode off. It was just as well she never saw home again; her mother would be doomed to another killing. I walked east through the complex, finally catching the scent of fruit among the dust, and followed until I found the garden.

Twined with Creosote Bush and Desert Willows, draped with limbs of Joshua and Smoke Trees and Screwbean Mesquite, they'd refashioned Eden.

Colors exploded from every direction with blooms of Freesia and Belladonna, the Mariposa Lilies and brilliant Ghost Flowers. Cl.u.s.ters of fine, tiny, barbed spines hid among the ropes and tendrils of plants, sap drooling across branches. Numerous erect stems with bright, red-to-orange blossoms and white leaves flowed into the brush and trees. I slipped between the bushes, careful of the Saguaro Cacti and Crucifixion Thorns, and heard laughter.

At last, the Well. Dozens of people gathered in a much larger pool, the young and ancient and the naked dead stewed together in the frothing mix. They swam and drowned and made love in the water, one huge clot of roiling bodies. I pressed my way among the throng, plunged in, and could feel the cold currents sweeping up from the depths. Vibrations of machinery thrummed in my ears and on the edge of memory. The Tenfew's filtration system and reticulation pipes had to be perfect in order to clean out the corpses. The man I'd been had a background in underwater demolitions and enjoyed the feel of slicing through the water. It took two minutes to fully oxygenate my lungs, and then I dove and kicked for the bottom.

At least one of the entry ports would back flush as part of the filtration system. The drowned were dragged down in a long train, the subtle undertow drawing them as they spun and waved and shimmied into the darkness. I followed the dead, as I usually did, and descended to about a hundred feet, the effective three atmospheres starting to drive into my skull, my chest burning, and allowed the distillation to draw me into the pipe. If I could hold out another ninety seconds, I'd be at the heart of the labs, where the Tenfew would still be experimenting with humanity and G.o.d after all these millennia. If I couldn't hold out, I'd have to start all over again inside another man. The thought didn't please me or the a.s.sa.s.sin I'd been.

Carca.s.ses tightened around me as the piping grew smaller, and my breath bubbled between my lips in agony. Death and life grew even more into one as mouths brushed my own for a moment, and were tugged away.

With an enormous roar and splashing purge, I came free into a much wider funnel and came up for breath inside a large tank where the debris was divided into separate streams that whirled along. Bodies wove past me like fish trapped in towing nets of a trawler.

I flopped out of the filtration tanks and fell on my face sucking sterile air. This was the distillation center of a much cleaner religion. The labs would be directly next door, as they had been since the crypts of Egypt when they'd studied and catalogued brains before embalming and mummifying the dead.

I struggled to the door and found it locked with a simple keypad numerical combination. They could never remember if the 666 was the number of the savior or the serpent, or if there was any difference.

There wasn't. I slid into the lab and found their computers and machines whirring and droning as loudly and emptily as those machines in Jeffy Grant's bedroom.

Schematics, readouts, and charts on the social, genealogical, ethnic, and theological evolution of the world filled the screens. I called up diagrams and scales on the growth of the Tenfew, their architectural plans, new government order, history, the eager spread of the racial virus, the presumed rise of beautiful island cities. They still had no reason for the temple, they just liked it. In a caustic glowing red one computer spat all Epidemiological records for food, air, and water-borne and s.e.xually-transmitted diseases: cholera, meningitis, hemorrhagic fever, AIDS, influenza, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, yellow fever, and Western Equine Encephalitis. They'd found a cure to all major diseases and most of the smaller ones as well, but would have to allow the vaccinations out step by step over the next century. In creating the vaccines, they'd also stumbled onto and mutated other infections, including the bubonic and pneumonic forms of our old friend Yersinia pest is the Black Plague.

All samples were kept in the black box room, a separate hyper-insulated lab used for storing hot zone samples. Using the automatoid robotic arms and skeletal pl asti-steel claws, I enabled the controls, cracked open the protective seals in the chamber, and stared through the window at the now lethal air in the black box the same way Jeffy Grant had stared at the dust.

I brought my lips to the gla.s.s, for the h.e.l.l of it.

She entered.

Her hair was wet, as it had been on that first day of the world. She turned and peered at me, and I watched as our entire history welled in her eyes. It staggered her as it had done me, and she reached for my hand as she always did. I took her in my arms and felt the blood tide beneath her flesh, and knew my wife.

For a moment I had no idea what to call her. She hadn't gone by her name since her sheep herding son had been murdered by his brother. The queen of these new G.o.ds was known as Katha, I recalled, or maybe it was Hatha or Latha, and I didn't find them to be any worse than Hera or Freya or Isis, but none quite as lovely as Sequana or Ninmah.

"h.e.l.lo." J said.

"Oh. h.e.l.lo, Seth."

She would hope to kill me now, as I pressed my cheek to nuzzle her neck--she usually made a halfhearted attempt before sobbing beneath the abject weight of the sorrow that had befallen us. I waited, but she merely held me as we slowly swayed together.

"So, what do you think?" she asked.

"Pretty hokey^ The Tenfew? Children of the Well?

About the worst you've come up with yet. You don't even have a holy book this time."

"It gets more difficult."

"Yes, I know."

We looked to the lab door because this was his cue.

and always had been.

He entered with a young man following at his side, an adolescent who didn't smile insanely and whose hair was dry. His son, no doubt, or perhaps mine. The Fruiteater had difficulty in ever forgoing the past or learning from it. He still looked the way he had when I'd first met him, just as all his sons had looked through the ages. I, too, always looked like Seth, and the sons of Seth, and the sons of Adam, and we were all exactly the same.

Even his rage had worn as thin as a leaf, and when he grimaced at me it seemed more like a child trying to hold in a laugh.

"You're a liar," he said.

"An a.s.sa.s.sin, a deceiver." The puerile words came to him by rote, without meaning or intent or fear of what was going to happen next.

"You've always been a beguile r."

We'd said these sentences many times in many ways, but at least I hadn't tired of them yet.

"I simply offered you a choice. You took it. You made it."

He held a collapsible rifle with magna-fire that he'd taken off of one of the lost team members, the laser rangefinder aimed at my heart. I took a step toward him, and he spoke with such a monotone that it sounded like the voice of emptiness itself.

"Stop, no closer."

"Stop? You actually said that to me?" For a man with the knowledge of all humanity under his tongue, who'd been able to build empires and cure murder and find water where there was none, he wasn't very bright anymore.

"Don't take another step."

"You get more foolish every time I see you."

I've rarely pulled the trick on him, but it had to be done again. I moved in fast and low. and he pulled the trigger and shot the a.s.sa.s.sin Will Gardner and blew out the entire chest cavity. I sighed inside his son and reached out and disarmed him and threw the rifle across the room. He had a puzzled expression on his face like he was having a difficult time remembering the last time this scene unfolded in this fashion.

He'd grown so forgetful.

"Don't you understand? This is complete bliss," he argued, because like all men and G.o.ds he was doomed by his own conceit.

"They do have a choice, they've always had a choice, and they choose to be at peace with us. They are my children."