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outside.
    “Okay,” Gojiro replied, drawing a breath. There was no effort to it, no psychic’s writhe and roil, no incanting exorcist’s gory pliers to pull pseudoverities from a recalcitrant beyond. All the monster had to do was open his mouth and Budd Hazard came out.
    The wealth of information! The generosity of cognizance! First came tales of life on Lavarock, details to fill in Gojiro’s misty recollections of his former Hallowed Homelands. Legends and practices of the Zardic Line upon the Precious Pumice were copiously enumerated. Komodo could never get enough. So thoroughly cut off from his own previous existence, he reveled in the summoning of Gojiro’s past, illusionary or not. He sat rapt as the monster spieled out uninterrupted sagas of the hunt, whether it be the brutish rush against the foreflanks of a snorty tapir or the intricacies of tonguespearing a hingehung insect from its gossamer web.
    “What a paradise,” Komodo marveled.
    “That it was, that it was,” Gojiro said, leaning back, bathed in light and glowing, “a world like no other.” But then pain shot through him. “Except it’s nothing now. Atomized, blown apart. Wiped from the face of the earth. I alone survive to tell thee, Jack.”
    In the beginning, Gojiro thought that was what Budd Hazard was about: an afterimage of a life forever lost, a message in a reverberating bottle somehow wedged inside his malformed ear during the Heater’s storm. But it quickly became apparent that Budd Hazard was much more than a dry lament. Recollections of Lavarock were the merest germ of what he seemed to know.
    There was the night when the fission gales grew fierce and Komodo and Gojiro huddled together inside the volcano of their as-yet unnamed island. “Be Budd Hazard,” the frightened Komodo entreated, seeking comfort against the tumult.
    “All right,” Gojiro said, swallowing hard. The monster closed his eyes and moaned. “The scheme of the Universe,” he began, “is embraced within an all-encompassing System called the Evolloo. Everything living, everything that has lived, everything that ever will live is contained inside the unimaginable parameters of the Blessed Blueprint. It is a Vast Flow, a Miraculous Spine of Energy and from it, like the tributaries of a Great River, spring all forms of Life. Those who are Honest and True must learn to walk these Paths so that they may come to know their own Identity and place within the Great Plan—for this is the Order of Things.”
    Then, snapping from his trance, Gojiro looked at Komodo, saw how the sweat poured from his friend’s startled brow. “What I say?” the reptile asked.
    Komodo repeated it as best he could.
    “Geez . . .”
    From that point forward the Budd Hazard sessions took on a new gravity. Now they weren’t just to pass the time, but rather to create the very meaning of Time. It no longer seemed fit for them to receive Budd Hazard’s messages walking on the beach or swimming out by the Cloudcover, a half a mile from shore, Komodo balancing himself upon Gojiro’s snout. A special section of the ’cano was set aside, decked with fluoro-candles calibrated to best approximate a guru’s most conducive thinktank.
    Gojiro lay on a massive pile of paisley cushions, with Komodo hovering, poised to record whatever was spoken.
    “I can’t,” Gojiro said as they were about to commence. “I can’t find him.”
    “Concentrate,” Komodo said.
    “I never had to concentrate before. I’m just nervous, I guess.”
    “Me too,” Komodo confessed.
    Truth was, they were more than nervous. They were filled with dread. Budd Hazard beckoned them to a mysterium of obscure Flows, great Forces of Energy extending through Eternity—an Unknown place where they imagined, in their battered, eager souls, they would find the Sacred. At this threshold they faltered. Everything about them—their world, that dank and spewing Island—was without form. By what license did they feel they could