"Lord of Light"

[fiefoe]

Roger Zelazny's appropriation of Indian mythology is cheeky, but at least semi-serious. Sam is this irreverant Prometheus-like bro.

• It was in the days of the rains that their prayers went up, not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords or the spinning of prayer wheels, but from the great pray-machine in the monastery of Ratri, goddess of the Night. <> The high-frequency prayers were directed upward through the atmosphere and out beyond it, passing into that golden cloud called the Bridge of the Gods, which circles the entire world, is seen as a bronze rainbow at night and is the place where the red sun becomes orange at midday.
• 'No matter, now,' said the other. 'We've hooked our fish. Out of Nirvana and into the lotus, he comes.'
  There was more thunder, and the rain came down with a sound like hail upon the lotus. Snakes of blue lightning coiled, hissing, about the mountaintops.
  Yama sealed a final circuit.
• One night, long ago, in happier times and better form, he had danced with her, on a balcony under the stars. It had been for only a few moments. But he remembered; and it is a difficult thing to be an ape and to have such memories.
• * 'Why else? When there is no real hope we must mint our own. If the coin be counterfeit it still may be passed.'
  'Counterfeit? You do not believe he was the Buddha?'
  She laughed, briefly. 'Sam was the greatest charlatan in the memory of god or man. He was also the worthiest opponent Trimurti ever faced. Don't look so shocked at my saying it. Archivist! You know that he stole the fabric of his doctrine, path and attainment, the whole robe, from prehistorical forbidden sources. It was a weapon, nothing more. His greatest strength was his insincerity.
• Once again did he stand at the side of Night Immortal, of whom it has been written, 'The goddess has filled wide space, to its depths and its heights. Her radiance drives out the dark.'
• Thereafter to be portrayed in murals at the ends of countless corridors, carved upon the walls of Temples and painted onto the ceilings of numerous palaces, came the awakening of he who was variously known as Mahasamatman, Kalkin, Manjusri, Siddhartha, Tathagatha, Binder, Maitreya, the Enlightened One, Buddha and Sam. At his left was the goddess of Night; to his right stood Death; Tak, the ape, was crouched at the foot of the bed, eternal comment upon the coexistence of the animal and the divine.
• To have permitted you to walk the world, in any form, would have left the door open for your return. So, as you stole your teachings from the Gottama of another place and time, did they steal the tale of the end of that one's days among men. You were judged worthy of Nirvana. Your atman was projected, not into another body, but into the great magnetic cloud that encircles this planet. That was over half a century ago. You are now officially an avatar of Vishnu,
• 'The reverse?' <> 'He does study the object, considering its ways, in an effort to bind himself. He seeks within it an excuse to live. He tries once more to wrap himself within the fabric of Maya, the illusion of the world.'
• * demons: 'Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not—so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will.' <> 'Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.'
• They took on the shapes of his nightmares to devil him. This is why they had to be defeated and bound, far beneath the Ratnagaris. We could not destroy them all. We could not permit them to continue their attempts to possess the machines of incarnation and the bodies of men. So they were trapped and contained in great magnetic bottles.'
• * 'I can break a giant with these hands, Yama. What are you but a banished carrion god? Your frown may claim the aged and the infirm. Your eyes may chill dumb animals and those of the lower classes of men. I stand as high above you as a star above the ocean's bottom.'
• Yama rolled a cigarette with care and precision. 'It must be arranged that what I said is what actually occurred.' <> 'How can that be? When a man's brain is subject to karmic play-back, all the events he has witnessed in his most recent cycle of life are laid out before his judge and the machine, like a scroll.' <> 'That is correct,' said Yama. 'And have you. Tak of the Archives, never heard of a palimpsest
• * 'This very night, this very hour,' he said, 'while the image of the act flames within their consciousness and their thoughts are troubled, the new truth will be forged and nailed into place... You must preach them a sermon. You must call forth within them those nobler sentiments and higher qualities of spirit which make men subject to divine meddling. Ratri and I will then combine our powers and a new truth will be born.'
• But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming. The thing that has never happened before is still happening. It is still a miracle. The great burning blossom squats, flowing, upon the limb of the world, excreting the ash of the world, and being none of these things I have named and at the same time all of them, and this is reality—the Nameless.
• It hearkens not to my words, but to the reality within me, of which it is part. This is the atman, which hears me rather than my words. All else is unreal. To define is to lose. The essence of all things is the Nameless. The Nameless is unknowable, mightier even than Brahma. Things pass, but the essence remains. You sit, therefore, in the midst of a dream.
• 'The Nameless, of which we are all a part, does dream form. And what is the highest attribute any form may possess? It is beauty. The Nameless, then, is an artist. The problem, therefore, is not one of good or evil, but one of esthetics. To struggle against those who are mighty among dreamers and are mighty for ill, or ugliness, is not to struggle for that which the sages have taught us to be meaningless in terms of Samsara or Nirvana, but rather it is to struggle for the symmetrical dreaming of a dream, in terms of the rhythm and the point, the balance and the antithesis which will make it a thing of beauty.
• It is difficult to stir rebellion among those to whom all things are good. There is no room for evil in their minds, despite the fact that they suffer it constantly. The slave upon the rack who knows that he will be born again—perhaps as a fat merchant — if he suffers willingly—his outlook is not the same as that of a man with but one life to live... If such a one does not choose to believe in good or evil, perhaps then beauty and ugliness can be made to serve him as well.

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• a richly woven tapestry of blue, brown, yellow, red and green, wherein was worked a series of hunting and battle scenes: riders mounted on slizzard and horse met with lance and bow the charges of feather-panda, fire-rooster and jewel-podded command plant; green apes wrestled in the tops of trees; the Garuda Bird clutched a sky demon in its talons, assailing it with beak and pinions; from the depths of the sea crawled an army of horned fish, clutching spikes of pink coral in their jointed fins, facing a row of kirtled and helmeted men who bore lances and torches to oppose their way upon the land.
• 'Many, many years ago, in another place, I knew him when he was captain of a ship which did not sail these oceans.'
• * 'and you come from afar.' 'You are correct,' said Sam, 'but tell me how you know these things.'...  So he would not remain so long as to leave the marks of rings deeply imprinted upon the fingers. The wealthy are never despoiled of their bodies. If they are refused rebirth, they live out the full span of their days. The Masters would fear a rising up in arms among the followers of such a one, were he to meet with other than a natural passing. So a body such as yours could not be obtained in this manner. A body from the life tanks would not have marked fingers either.
• The body merchants are now the Masters of Karma. Their individual names are now kept secret, after the manner of the gods, so that they seem as impersonal as the Great Wheel, which they claim to represent. They are no longer merely body merchants, but are allied with the Temples. These, too, are changed, for your kinsmen of the First who are now gods do commune with them from Heaven.
• 'For a start, tell me—why 'Janagga'?' <> 'Why not?' asked the other. 'It has a certain earnest, working-class sound about it. How about yourself? Still in the prince business?'
• * About a dozen years ago the Council authorized the use of psych-probes on those who were up for renewal. This was right after the Accelerationist-Deicrat split, when the Holy Coalition squeezed out the tech boys and kept right on squeezing. The simplest solution was to outlive the problem. The Temple crowd then made a deal with the body sellers, customers were brain-probed and Accelerationists were refused renewal, or . . . well . . . simple as that... They read over your past life, weigh the karma, and determine your life that is yet to come. It's a perfect way of maintaining the caste system and ensuring Deicratic control. By the way, most of our old acquaintances are in it up to their halos.'
• 'The probe,' said Jan, 'is sensitive enough to tell what you had for breakfast eleven years ago yesterday
  The kid who loved weapons? The fellow who anesthetized one of everything that moves out there and dissected it, taking such pleasure in his studies that we called him deathgod?... He now is deathgod—not by nickname, but by title.
• Trimurti rules—that is, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Which of these three be chiefest at any one time, I cannot say. Some say Brahma—'
  'Who are they—really?' asked Sam.
  Jan shook his head. 'I do not know. They all wear different bodies than they did a generation ago. They all use god names.'
• * watching the dozen girls at sport in the pool, hoping to see one or more cast an appreciative glance upon the dark, heavily muscled length of his body. Black upon brown, his mustaches glistened in moist disarray and his hair was a black wing upon his back... It was almost as if sex were a thing that transcended biology; and no matter how hard he tried to suppress the memory and destroy that segment of spirit, Brahma had been born a woman and somehow was woman still. Hating this thing, he had elected to incarnate time after time as an eminently masculine man, did so, and still felt somehow inadequate, as though the mark of his true sex were branded upon his brow. It made him want to stamp his foot and grimace.
• * 'What have you been doing all this time,' asked the god, 'since you left the roost of Heaven?' <> 'Cultivating my own gardens,' said Sam.
• * Too much time passed. They are not ready, and will not be for many centuries. If they were to be exposed to an advanced technology at this point, the wars which would ensue would result in the destruction of the beginnings they have already made. They have come far. They have begun a civilization after the manner of their fathers of old. But they are still children, and like children would they play with our gifts and be burnt by them... We must not permit them to be accelerated into an industrial revolution and so destroy the first stable society on this planet.
• It was just a guess, based upon some of your mannerisms of speech and gesture which I remembered. So you've finally achieved your lifelong ambition, eh? I'll bet you've got a harem, too. What's it feel like, madam, to be a real stud after having been a gal to start out with?
• If they do, we shall walk through the Palace and Hall of the Masters of Karma like a small boy across an extensive and excessively elaborate ant hill. Good luck. No gods be with you!'
• 'The rest of my lancers are arrived. Had I entered in full force, you'd have holed up like a gekk in a woodpile, and it might have taken days to pull your palace apart and fetch you out.
• The Buddha remained in his grove and all things came to him. With the passage of years the festival grew larger and longer and more elaborate, like a well-fed dragon, scales all a-shimmer.
• When the actors appeared, gigantic in their makeup, ankle bells jangling as their feet beat the ground, there was no applause, only rapt attention. The kathakali dancers were famous, trained from their youth in acrobatics as well as the ages-old patterns of the classical dance, knowing the nine distinct movements of the neck and of the eyeballs and the hundreds of hand positions required to re-enact the ancient epics of love and battle, of the encounters of gods and demons, of the valiant fights and bloody treacheries of tradition.
• It was many months before the miracle occurred, and when it did, it did not seem a miracle, for it had grown up slowly about them. <> Rild, who had come out of the north as the winds of spring blew across the land, wearing death upon his arm and the black fire within his eyes—Rild, of the white brows and pointed ears—spoke one afternoon, after the spring had passed, when the long days of summer hung warm beneath the Bridge of the Gods... Tathagatha shared the preaching with him. Together, they taught of the Way of the Eightfold Path, the glory of Nirvana, the illusion of the world and the chains that the world lays upon a man. <> And then there were times when even the soft-spoken Tathagatha listened to the words of his disciple
• Then, in the ancient words of the Katha Upanishad, the one who had been called Rild and Sugata chanted:
  ''There is doubt concerning a man when he is dead. Some say he still exists. Others say he does not. This thing I should like to know, taught by you.' '
  Yama replied with the ancient words, ''On this subject even the gods have their doubts. It is not easy to understand, for the nature of the atman is a subtle thing. Ask me another question. Release me from this boon!''
• I have never seen sacrifice made to Yama, simply, sincerely, with good will or affection.' 'He must feel offended.' 'Not so, warrior. For are not all living things, in themselves, sacrifices to Death?'
• At the end of this pathway was a massive tree, a tree such as did not grow upon the world, but rather held the world together with its roots, and with its branches reached up to utter leaves among the stars.
• The grasses began to wither, but before they had released him there came a great splintering, cracking noise, as the tree whose roots held together the world and in whose branches the stars were caught, as fish in a net, swayed forward, splitting down its middle, its uppermost limbs tearing apart the sky, its roots opening chasms in the ground,
• You chose to resurrect it, pretending to be its originator. You decided to spread it, in hopes of raising an opposition to the religion by which the true gods rule. I admire the effort. It was cleverly planned and executed. But your biggest mistake, I feel, is that you picked a pacifistic creed with which to oppose an active one.
• One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding. You are aware of this, and now that you have sown the seeds of this stolen creed, you are planning to move on to another phase of opposition. You are trying to be a one-man antithesis to Heaven, opposing the will of the gods across the years, in many ways and from behind many masks.
• 'Perhaps,' said the other. 'As you know, the personal strengths and weaknesses of a leader are no true indication of the merits of his cause.'
• * 'Yes,' said Sam. 'What's she like, that bitch Kali? There are so many different reports that I'm beginning to believe she is all things to all men —'
• * 'Some quicksand,' said Sam, 'is quicker than other quicksand. Fortunately, you are settling into that of the slower sort.
• Now, take for example the death-gaze you are at this moment turning upon me. Is it not amazing how you keep this gift about you in all times and places, over the centuries? I have often wondered as to the physiological basis for the phenomenon...'Because you really have only one body-image, which is electrical as well as chemical in nature. It begins immediately to modify its new physiological environment. The new body has much about it which it treats rather like a disease, attempting to cure it into being the old body. If the body which you now inhabit were to be made physically immortal, it would someday come to resemble your original body.'
• You betrayed yourself in your fury, so I know that I speak the truth when I say that the name of your disease is Kali. You would not give power into the hands of the unworthy if that woman did not bid you do it. I knew her of old, and I am certain that she has not changed. She cannot love a man. She cares only for those who bring her gifts of chaos.
• 'In the meantime,' said Sam, 'I suggest you solicit aid of my followers or learn the difficult art of mud-breathing.'
• 'What is your power, Siddhartha? How do you do what you do?' it asked him. 'Call it electrodirection,' said the other, 'mind over energy. It is as good a term as any. But whatever you call it, do not seek to cross it again.
• He knew that it was now his own shadow.
  The doom which had pursued him no longer lay at his back.
  He knew that he was his own doom.
• * In a darkened, endless cathedral he rolled dice that were suns and planets. Meteors broke fire above his head, and comets inscribed blazing arcs upon a vault of black glass. There came to him a joy shot through with fear, and he knew it to be mainly that of another, but it was partly his, too. The fear—that was all his.
• * behold the flames of their beings, colored with the hues and shades of their passions, flickering with avarice and lust and envy, darting with greed and hunger, smouldering with hate, waning with fear and pain. His hell was a many-colored place, somewhat mitigated only by the cold blue blaze of a scholar's intellect, the white light of a dying monk, the rose halo of a noble lady who fled his sight, and the dancing, simple colors of children at play.
• Always, from the friction of these things, there arises the thing you called the curse of man and mocked—guilt! <> 'Know then, that as we existed together in the same body and I partook of your ways, not always unwillingly, the road we followed was not one upon which all the traffic moved in a single direction... You have learned the thing called guilt, and it will ever fall as a shadow across your meat and your drink.
• 'Think I'd have a chance?'
  'You just might. Times change. Brahma could be a merciful god this week.'
  'My occupational therapist told me to specialize in lost causes.'
• Godhood is more than a name. It is a condition of being. One does not achieve it merely by being immortal, for even the lowliest laborer in the fields may achieve continuity of existence. Is it then the conditioning of an Aspect? No. Any competent hypnotist can play games with the self-image. Is it the raising up of an Attribute? Of course not. I can design machines more powerful and more accurate than any faculty a man may cultivate. Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extent that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe, so that those who look upon you know this without hearing your name spoken. Some ancient poet said that the world is full of echoes and correspondences.
• * Being a god is being able to recognize within one's self these things that are important, and then to strike the single note that brings them into alignment with everything else that exists. Then, beyond morals or logic or esthetics, one is wind or fire, the sea, the mountains, rain, the sun or the stars, the flight of an arrow, the end of a day, the clasp of love. One rules through one's ruling passions. Those who look upon gods then say, without even knowing their names, 'He is Fire. She is Dance. He is Destruction. She is Love.'
• 'Do you serve the gods because you believe what you have said to me—or because you hate the larger portion of humanity?'
  'I did not lie to you.'
  'Then Death is an idealist. Amusing.'
• If Brahma has me burnt, I will spit into the flames. If he has me strangled, I will attempt to bite the executioner's hand. If my throat is cut, may my blood rust the blade that does it. Is that a ruling passion?'
• Vishnu, the Preserver, held the entire Celestial City within his mind, until the day he circled Milehigh Spire on the back of the Garuda Bird, stared downward and the City was captured perfect in a drop of perspiration on his brow.
• * 'You fertility deities are worse than Marxists,' he said. 'You think that's all that goes on between people. We were just friends for a time, but she is too hard on her friends and so loses them.'
• 'I gather that our guest mocked Brahma some years ago in Mahartha and did violence in holy places. I understand, though, that he is the same one who founded the religion of peace and enlightenment.'
• there, in the center of renunciation and abandonment, withdrawal and departure, are the five rooms named Memory, Fear, Heartbreak, Dust and Despair; and this place was built by Kubera the Fat, who cared not a tittle for any of these sentiments, but who, as a friend of Lord Kalkin, had done this construction at the behest of Candi the Fierce, sometimes known as Durga and as Kali, for he alone of all the gods possessed the Attribute of inanimate correspondence, whereby he could invest the works of his hands with feelings and passions to be experienced by those who dwelled among them.
• 'But I recall the springtime of the world as though it were yesterday—those days when we rode together to battle, and those nights when we shook the stars loose from the fresh-painted skies! The world was so new and different then, with a menace lurking within every flower and a bomb behind every sunrise. Together we beat a world, you and I, for nothing really wanted us here and everything disputed our coming.
• 'Open a fruit and there is a seed within it. Is that the center? Open the seed and there is nothing within it. Is that the center? We are two different persons from the master and the mistress of battles. It was good to have known those two, but that is all.'
• * 'You give your promises too easily. You break them as readily as you make them, and because of this I can never trust you. If we fight and we win in the name of Accelerationism, it may also be the last great battle of this world. This is a thing you could not desire, nor permit to occur.'
  'You are a fool to speak of last great battles, Sam, for the last great battle is always the next one. Shall I come to you in a more comely shape to convince you that I speak the truth? Shall I embrace you in a body with the seal of virginity set upon it? Will this make you to trust my word?'
  'Doubt, Lady, is the chastity of the mind, and I bear its seal upon my own.'
• when he had laid her bare on the couch and placed his hand upon the soft whiteness of her belly, he knew that Kubera was indeed the mightiest of the Lokapalas—for the feeling to which that room had been dedicated filled him, even as his desires mounted within him and he upon her—there came a loosening, a tightening, a sigh, and the ultimate tears burning to be shed.
• about Accelerationism—it is a simple doctrine of sharing. It proposes that we of Heaven give unto those who dwell below of our knowledge and powers and substance. This act of charity would be directed to the end of raising their condition of existence to a higher level, akin to that which we ourselves occupy... in so doing we would destroy their simple faith and remove all basis for their hoping that things will be better—for the best way to destroy faith or hope is to let it be realized. Why should we permit men to suffer this burden of godhood collectively, as the Accelerationists wished, when we do grant it to them individually when they come to deserve it?
• Some even dared claim that Heaven was comprised of an immortal aristocracy of wilful hedonists who played games with the world. Others dared to say that the best of men never achieve godhood, but meet ultimately with the real death or incarnation into a lower life form.
• Vishnu smiled. 'Better to incorporate than struggle to extirpate?' <> 'Almost an epigram.'
• 'All right,' said Sam, 'though I doubt you would be interested in a task this difficult—' <> 'You can skip over the child psychology and tell me what it is you want stolen.'
• Kali+Yama wedding: A festive spirit had also infected Heaven, and with the gathering of the gods and the demigods, the heroes and the nobles, the high priests and the favored rajahs and high-ranking Brahmins, this spirit obtained force and momentum and spun like an all-colored whirlwind, thundering in the heads of the First and latest alike.
• * in the days and nights of their coming, it was said by the poet Adasay that they resembled at least six different things (he was always lavish with his similes): a migration of birds, bright birds, across a waveless ocean of milk; a procession of musical notes through the mind of a slightly mad composer; a school of those deep-swimming fish whose bodies are whorls and runnels of light, circling about some phosphorescent plant within a cold and sea-deep pit; the Spiral Nebula, suddenly collapsing upon its center; a storm, each drop of which becomes a feather, songbird or jewel; and (and perhaps most cogent) a Temple full of terrible and highly decorated statues, suddenly animated and singing, suddenly rushing forth across the world, bright banners playing in the wind, shaking palaces and toppling towers, to meet at the center of everything, to kindle an enormous fire and dance about it, with the ever-present possibility of either the fire or the dance going completely out of control.
• Loathed in darkness, / Clothed in light, / He comes, to end a world, / As morning ends the night.
• Then Lord Yama clasped her hand and Kali cast an offering of grain into the fire, about which Yama led her, their garments having been knotted together by one of her retainers. After this, Kali trod upon a millstone, and the two of them took seven steps together, Kali treading upon a small pile of rice with each step. Then was a light rain summoned down from the sky for the space of several heartbeats, to sanctify the occasion with the blessing of water.
• as Shiva danced in a graveyard the Dance of Destruction and the Dance of Time, celebrating the legend of his annihilation of the three flying cities of the Titans, and Krishna the Dark moved through the Wrestler's Dance in commemoration of his breaking of the black demon Bana, while Lakshmi danced the Dance of the Statue, and even Lord Vishnu was coerced into celebrating again the steps of the Dance of the Amphora, as Murugan, in his new body, laughed at the world clad in all her oceans, and did his dance of triumph upon those waters as upon a stage, the dance that he had danced after the slaying of Shura,
• Tak of the Archives and the Bright Spear was judged by the Lords of Karma and was transmigrated into the body of an ape; and there was a warning set within his mind that wherever he presented himself for renewal he was to be given again into the body of an ape,
• 'Hast thou not heard of a thing, a wondrous thing, a thing into which these items are discharged—into water—and then a lever pulled, and then, with a mighty rushing sound, these things are borne away, far beneath the ground?'
• 'With a changing of bodies one is automatically divorced, unless a continuation contract be signed.'
  'Yes.'
  'Brahma must needs be a man.'
  'Yes.'
  'Refuse it.'
  'My Lord . . .'
• 'I decided that mankind could live better without gods. If I disposed of them all, people could start having can openers and cans to open again, and things like that, without fearing the wrath of Heaven.
• 'So I asked myself if there was any means by which Sam could have escaped death. I could think of none, other than a change of bodies. Who, I then asked myself, took upon him a new body the day Sam died? There was only Lord Murugan. This did not seem logical, however, because he did it after Sam's death, not before it... Like the prints of the palms and the fingers of the hands, no two minds register the same patterns; But from body to body one does retain a similar mind-matrix, despite the fact that a different brain's involved. Regardless of the thoughts passing through the mind, the thought patterns record themselves unique to the person. I compared yours with a record of Murugan's which I found in Yama's laboratory. They were not the same.
• Five hundred lancers were held to the rear. The silver cyclones that were the Rakasha hung in the middle air. Across the half-lit world the occasional growl of a jungle beast could be heard. Fire elementals glowed upon tree limb, lance and pennon pole. <> There were no clouds in the heavens. The grasses of the plain were still moist and sparkling. The air was cool, the ground still soft enough to gather footprints readily.
• It is said that each day recapitulates the history of the world, coming up out of darkness and cold into confused light and beginning warmth, consciousness blinking its eyes somewhere in midmorning, awakening thoughts a jumble of illogic and unattached emotion, and all speeding together toward the order of noontide, the slow, poignant decline of dusk, the mystical vision of twilight, the end of entropy that is night once more.
• Mara grew into a giant, and his chariot was a mountain. His horses spanned eternities as they galloped forward. Lightning leapt from Sam's lance, like spray from a fountain. A blizzard suddenly swirled about him, and the cold of interstellar space itself entered into his bones.
• Accordingly, he was transmigrated. Not into another body.
  A radio tower was erected, Sam was placed under sedation, transfer leads were attached in the proper manner, but there was no other body. They were attached to the tower's converter.
  His atman was projected upward through the opened dome, into the great magnetic cloud that circled the entire planet and was called the Bridge of the Gods.
• 'True, nevertheless. I received this now ancient body the day Sam broke the Lords of Karma at Mahartha. I was there.'
  'One of the First, and—yes!—a Christian!'
  'Occasionally, when I run out of Hindi swear words.'
• I've been designing new weapons. It is a shame that there must be so many separate and exotic ones. It is quite a drain on my genius to make each a work of art, rather than to mass-produce a particular species of offense. But the plurality of the paranormal dictates it. Someone always has an Attribute to stand against any one weapon. Let them face, though, the Gehenna Gun and be fibrillated apart, or cross blades with the Electrosword, or stand before the Fountain Shield, with its spray of cyanide and dimethyl sulfoxide, and they will know that it is the Lokapalas they face!'
• 'I lied. I never believed in it myself, and I still don't. I could just as easily have chosen another way—say, Nirriti's religion—only crucifixion hurts. I might have chosen one called Islam, only I know too well how it mixes with Hinduism. My choice was based upon calculation, not inspiration, and I am nothing.' <> 'You are the Lord of Light.'
• But look around you . . . <> Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.