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found
himself back in familiar surroundings. Hastily rigged work lights
strung along the ceiling provided enough illumination for Rees to
see clearly now and he quickly found his gun on the floor. He
picked it up and placed the barrel to his temple.
    “ Please, Nicholas, don’t
do anything rash.”
    Rees’s mind snapped back from the brink and
he turned to see a tall, striking man wearing ragged, wrinkled suit
encrusted with dried blood. The man should have been a stranger,
but the suit, and the seven bullet holes still visible on it, was
too familiar. There were two new holes as well, fresh blood
dripping from each.
    “ You’re confused,” Kurush
said, “afraid. You’re wondering how it is that you could be in two
places without moving. You’re wondering how it is that I can be
standing here before you now.”
    Rees pointed his gun at the man who should
have been dead.
    “ Oh, come now, Nicholas,
we’ve been through this already, haven’t we? It was Vandum’s charge
to do the same so that we might be here tonight, though he knew it
not. At least give me the chance to speak.”
    Rees wanted to squeeze the trigger. He tried
to squeeze the trigger. But nothing happened. His finger would not
budge and Kurush simply stood there looking at him without a trace
of concern.
    He lowered the gun.
    “ Isn’t it beautiful?”
Kurush gestured to the unfinished, crooked walls around him. Rees
tried to speak, but found that his voice no longer
worked.
    “ Do you understand what
you’re looking at, at what generations of work have achieved? I
wasn’t always just an architect for Sircotin, you see. I’ve held
its hand since its inception, from one innovation to the next,
always working towards a singular goal. This building is the very
essence of what the company was built to achieve; it’s a
transmitter, a direct line of communication to the true essence of
the universe.
    “ I once thought as you do,
that all attempts to improve man lead to folly. I resisted change
just as you have done while everyone around you reshaped their
lives to accommodate the ingenuity of great minds. But then I saw
the truth. I reveled in the brilliant, magnificent energies of
creation, of the great swirling chaos from which true greatness is
born. We think ourselves creatures of reason, of logic, but that is
not our true nature. Tell me, Nicholas, do you dream?”
    Rees didn’t want to nod, but he did.
    “ Of course you do,” Kurush
said. “And do your dreams not seem more vibrant and alive than this
banal prison we’ve created for ourselves? That is because we are
born of dreams, Nicholas, not of reason. We are shaped in His
image, the fruits of His terrible and divine genius. Even now He
seeks to reach across the cold gulf of space and touch us, to give
us but a glimpse of our destiny. It’s a grave burden to endure such
secrets for so long, Nicholas. You must help me now to carry on the
work of a thousand lifetimes.”
    A part of Rees’s mind, the rational,
conscious portion, tried to raise his gun again, but his body would
not obey. It was too much under the sway of his unconscious mind,
the dreaming mind. And it had seen. It had seen it with Rees’s own
eyes, seen the swelling, pulsating plain of flesh and bone; it had
seen the thing that would drive mankind to horrors and virtuosities
beyond his meager imaginings. It had been but a glimpse, but it was
seared in his soul so strongly that even death would not free him
from the sight of it.
    Trust those eyes of yours, Detective.
    Had those words been a warning or an
invitation? Perhaps there was no difference between the two.
    Kurush stepped closer and placed his hands
on Rees’s head.
    “ This is not the end,
Nicholas,” he said. “There is never an end, only the infinite
beginning.”
    And then Rees saw more.
    The horror of the previous sight was but the
surface of a power unfathomably greater than even a madman could
conceive. The man who called himself Aran Kurush, the man