"So I did it. I focused my entire will and strength upon constructing for myself a living sheath of human flesh, complete in all parts, and I chose—without even thinking about it—to be male. Does this require an explanation?"

"Not really," I said. "I would imagine you had seen enough of rape, childbirth, and helpless struggle to make the wiser choice. I know I have."

"Correct. But sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I wonder if things would have been entirely different if I had chosen to be female. I could have. The females resemble us more, truly. But if we are both, then surely we are more male than female. It is not in equal parts." "From what you've shown me of yourself, I tend to agree."

"So. I became sheathed in flesh. It took a little longer than one might suppose. I had to consciously evoke every bit of knowledge in my angelic memory; I had to construct the body, and then insert my essence in it exactly in the manner in which the natural life essence would have been inside it; and I had to surrender, that is, encase myself within this body, really go into it, and fill out its limits and not panic. Then I had to look through its eyes."

I nodded quietly with a trace of a smile. Having given up my vampire body for a human one, I could perhaps imagine a small particle of what Memnoch had experienced. I wasn't about to boast that I understood.

"The process involved no pain," he said. "Only submission. And for no good reason, really, or I should say from simple Nature, to use God's favorite word, I sheathed my own self, my own essence in flesh. Only the wings-did I leave out of the scheme altogether, and so I stood as tall as an angel, and as I walked to the water of a clear pool near me and looked down in it, I saw Memnoch for the first time in material form. I saw exactly myself, my fair hair, my eyes, my skin, all the gifts God had given me in invisible form made manifest in flesh. "I realized immediately that this was too much! I was too large all over; I was blazing with the essence inside me! This would not work. And so instantly I began to reshape and scale down the entire body until it resembled more myself the size of a man.

"You'll know how to do all this once you're with me," he said, "if you choose to come, and die, and be my lieutenant. But let me say for now that this is neither impossible nor terribly simple. It is not like pressing the keys of a complex computer program and sitting back and watching the machine execute the commands one by one. On the other hand, it is not cumbersome and overly conscious. It merely takes angelic knowledge, angelic patience, and angelic will.