when the conflict is done, we can settle here, with the Zull?”
I thought about the man I’d been when she’d arrived on my doorstep, and recalled my parochial little vicarage in Theaston Vale with its dusty library and stultifying dullness. It filled me with disdain. It felt far more alien to me now than this world of three suns and bizarre creatures.
I put my hands over hers. “Yes, we can make our home here.”
“Together.”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
She sighed. “What you said.”
“Said?”
“When we were escaping from Phenadoor.”
I tried to respond but found myself unable to speak.
Clarissa smiled.
“I love you, too, Aiden Fleischer.” She leaned forward and put her lips to mine, then took me by the hand and led me into her room.
Clarissa was already awake, nestled against my shoulder, when I opened my eyes.
“You are most definitely not the man who answered the door to me all that time ago,” she whispered.
“You’re a fine one to talk,” I said drowsily. “Look at you!”
She giggled, and, after stretching a shapely leg into the air, sat up. “My metamorphosis is cosmetic, Aiden. As is yours—” Turning, she ran her fingers across the muscles of my stomach. “But with you there’s something more. A far deeper change.”
The last vestiges of sleep cleared. I propped myself up onto my elbows and looked into her startling eyes.
After a moment of thought, I said, “Cain and Abel.”
One of her eyebrows arched at this unanticipated turn in the conversation, creasing the skin around the little bump above it.
I went on, “It’s said that evil begets evil. I’ve always believed that, but it caused a crisis of faith in me, for, as you once pointed out, if you trace evil back to its source, you can’t stop at Cain but must continue on to God.”
“And how can we worship a God who’s capable of evil?” Clarissa responded.
“We can’t. And as the creation of one who begets evil, would we not all be Jekylls, liable to transform into Hydes at any moment?”
She suddenly blinked rapidly, gave a small exclamation, and said, “Gallokomas has just arrived on our terrace.”
The Zull’s voice sounded from my wrist. “Fleischer Thing!”
I pressed the tattoo and said, “Yes, Gallokomas?”
“The flock is gathering. Will you and your companions prepare yourselves, please?”
“Very well. We’ll be with you in a moment.”
Clarissa and I got up. She entered the washroom while I went to alert the colonel. When I rejoined her, I continued our conversation. “The Quintessence offered a solution to the dilemma. It suggested that, rather than being a product of God, evil is an entirely equal and opposite power.”
She wiped her face with a towel and gave a disdainful snort. “That doesn’t surprise me at all, Aiden. The Quintessence considers itself perfect. It makes the Mi’aata slaves to a moribund society in which all construction is nothing but pointless repetition. True creativity is suppressed. The trinity is blind to the iniquity of such a system. For the Quintessence, wrongdoing always comes from an exterior source, never from itself.”
“Which is why I can’t give credence to the notion of opposing deities,” I replied. “It makes of us a battleground and allows us to disavow all responsibility for what happens.”
We finished washing and re-entered the bedroom where we began to dress.
“Nor does it answer the essential question,” I continued. “Which is, if God didn’t create evil, what did? Something else? Do we now have to deny that God is the creator of all things? No, it won’t do.”
I buckled on my flight harness, feeling the comfortable weight of the pistol on my right hip and the sword on my left.
“What then, Aiden?”
“A chain of logic. If God is the epitome of good, there can be no evil in Him. If all things spring from Him, then they, too, must be comprised wholly of good. Therefore, evil is not a thing.”
“Have you forgotten London? Jack the Ripper was unquestionably evil!”
“We have to make a semantic transmutation. We must say, instead, that Jack the Ripper was catastrophically lacking in goodness.”
My companion scrutinized me thoughtfully. “Yes,” she said, slowly. “Yes. I see the implication. Altering the perspective suggests a richer purpose to the business of living.”
“Precisely. If you consider goodness as a spectrum, then at one end we have the unadulterated rectitude of God’s creation, and it is toward this that we must travel in our thoughts and actions. But if we become selfish, if we indulge in our lusts, our gluttony, our greed, or any of the other deadly sins, then we