He saw frightened pigeons fly to hiding places. He felt the god’s breath shake the world to bits in endless autumns; leaves committing exultant suicide. (“Ah hah,” Will yelled, dying with each leaf.) And he felt each living thing tremble, trying to preserve its life in the face of such cosmic temper tantrums. This god’s insanity whispered crookedly through men’s chromosomes, tainting them with flaws beyond number. The senile god shouted his incoherent truth to the multitudes, who in turn killed their neighbors and rode in bitter triumph through endless savage wars. Mad Mohammed flashed his eternal sword; Jehovah in fits of holy tremors sent down his plagues and flood; Jupiter and Thor threw their thunderbolts while Buddha contemplated his divine navel and in the streets his gurus sprinkled holy ash.

Seven screamed, “Stop!”

The insane god, who was at once Jehovah, Buddha, and all of the others, paused and seemed to notice Oversoul Seven for the first time. The earth that Seven was seeing took on the god’s features, so that Seven saw the treetops spinning in the wind as the shaken, tousled curls of Christ’s head; the oceans, the depthless pools of his insane delight and the unendurable realization of his plight; for this god knew he was a demon, raging, possessing the earth, tuning it to his own cosmic insane pitch until surely one day—today or tomorrow or in a million years—that pitch would become so agonizing that the god’s mind would split; divine neurons spilling out into mortality, the blessed essence contaminated beyond degree, and lost.

This was an insane vision. Seven tried to clear his consciousness, to shake it loose from the strands of despair that threatened to send him reeling into extinction. Hopelessly, he suddenly saw Lydia and Will falling through unnumbered days that wound back to the insane god’s infancy.

“I won’t live in such a world,” Will was shouting. His voice splintered the air beneath him, and at the same time his memories poured out of his mind into space.

And Lydia, furiously angry, stood for a moment, shaking her fists at the universe. “I won’t be born again in that mad world!” She was going to say more, but the insane god’s eye blinked and Lydia twirled, turning smaller and smaller, blown willy-nilly by the thunderous power of that divine blinking eye.

Seven’s astonishment at all of this slowed his reactions. What nightmare was this? But he couldn’t seem to break its spell, and the psychological implications of this disastrous vision were all too clear. He had to break away for Lydia and Will, and if they were lost … But how could they be? Again Seven cried out for Cyprus. This time she responded so abruptly and severely that Seven was snapped back to himself—so quickly that he felt as if a million shocks surged through the most vital portions of his consciousness.