There was something about Cyprus’ speech that wrinkled the edges of Oversoul Seven’s momentary smugness. He almost panicked, but instead he went on, quite bravely he thought: “Lydia knows what people expect of the gods. Of course, we’ll have to check out the old gods first. But if we find any new ones, they’ll have to know earth customs. Earth people keep their sexes separate, for example, as you know. In each life they stick to one sex or the other—”

“Or the other? So there are only two?”

Cyprus’ words went thundering through all of Oversoul Seven’s experience, scattering images everywhere. The millions of sexual variations of plant, mineral, and animal planetary life glittered before his mental eyes; the endless convoluted yet sparkling couplings and transcouplings by which life multiplied and refreshed itself. He knew it. He knew it all, but at some level he had forgotten. Or else he pretended not to know—for a reason. But for that moment, Seven stepped out of his own vision into that immeasurably vaster one, and he felt as if he possessed a thousand heads, all of them reeling. And in the very back of his mind, he wondered uneasily what he’d forgotten about the gods.

Cyprus was still saying, incredulously, “Only two?” when Seven regained himself. This time he took on his fourteen-year-old male image and stood there, head bowed, fresh new cheeks puffed out—pouting—and said, “Cyprus, that wasn’t fair at all.”

Now Cyprus looked far older than Lydia, older than anyone ever in the strangest fashion, even while her features hadn’t really changed in any usually observable way. She wanted to smile at Oversoul Seven and Lydia; she wanted to reassure them. Yet looking at them through her knowledge put them so far away that she could barely perceive them. She sorted through times and places, sometimes growing weary, until finally she found them again—Oversoul Seven first—drawn to him by that rambunctious energy of his, which now was turned into grave inquiry.

“Where were you?” he asked, telling himself that he should know better than to ask the question at all.

“I never know what’s going on,” Lydia protested. She sat down on the hallucinatory red couch, her fingers flashing nervously through the magazines. “I have the worst feeling that this search for the gods may end up in some completely different fashion than we suppose.”

But as a fourteen-year-old boy, Oversoul Seven felt himself drawn toward some ancient childhood, falling back into some newness that was (and is) the center of each tiniest spark of being. And he knew that godmaking was a children’s game; but the only one worth playing.