Nothing came out of my mouth but I had a mouth and the man was nodding as if he saw the tears. My God, help me. This man wanted to comfort me. Someone else spoke:
"That was Gregory Belkin's daughter, that's who that was," the man said, "That was Esther Belkin."
"Belkin's daughter-"
". . . Temple of the Mind."
"Temple of the Mind of God. Belkin."
What did these words mean to me?
Master! Where are you? Name yourself or show yourself! Who has called me? Why have I been made to witness this!
"Gregory Belkin's little girl, the Minders-"
Which way?
I began to fade. I felt it swift and terrible as it always is, as surely as if the Master had commanded all the artificial and gathered particles of me, as it is written, Return now to your place. Just for a moment, I clung to the storm of matter, commanding it to sheathe me, but my cry was a wail. I stared down at my hands, my feet, such filthy shoes, cloth and string and leather shoes, slippers more than shoes, shoes on the pavement:
"Azriel, stay alive!" came the voice from my mouth.
"Take it easy, son," said the man beside me. And he looked at me as if he felt sorry for me. He lifted his arm to embrace me. I put my hand up. I saw the tears.
But the wind had come, the wind that comes for all spirits. I was losing my hold.
The man was looking for me and he couldn't find me, and he didn't know why, and thought it was his own confusion.
Then he and all those with him-and the great city-was gone too.
I was nothing now, nothing.
I struggled to see the crowd below, but I couldn't find the spots where the Evals lay dead in their blood still or were being taken away with such care as the queen with her dark hair, the goddess who had died seeing me. She had said it, I heard it, she had said, "Azriel, the Servant of the Bones." I had heard her as a spirit hears, though the man in the car with her might not hear something so small and tragic as her whisper.
The wind took me. The wind was filled with the wail of the souls, faces bearing down upon me, hands seeking to grip me, and turning my back on it as always, I let go. I saw the last dim outline of my hands for one instant; I felt the form of arms and legs; I felt the tears on my face. Yes, I felt that. Then I was a goner.
Into the bones, Azriel. I was safe.
So there you have the picture! Masterless, risen, to witness this, to avenge it? Why? The darkness overcame me like a drug. Safe, yes, but I didn't want to be safe; I wanted to find the man who had sent those Evals to kill her.
Part III Chapter 16
16
Time passed.
I felt it more intensely than usual. I knew that I was listening. I was there.
I knew what the world was now, more or less, as always. Bear with me. I knew what men and women knew-those whom I'd seen and touched in the New York street.
The particulars made a moral impression. Emotion gradually accompanied the synthesis of knowledge. Ghosts don't have to interpret. Ghosts don't have to be amazed, or shocked.
But the mind of the ghost, unfettered by flesh, can gather to itself indiscriminately and perhaps infinitely the sum of what is shared or valued by nearby human minds.
Awake once more in the darkness, I grasped the general and the spectacular-that we were nearing the end of the twentieth century of what men call the common era, that fossil fuel and generated electricity were indispensable to the everyday methods of eating, drinking, sleeping, communicating, traveling, building, and fighting, that micromachines of exquisite circuitry could store information in abundance, and that vivid moving pictures in which people appeared and spoke could be transmitted by waves or over tiny delicate fibers more precious than spun glass.
Waves. The air was full of waves. Full of voices speaking both privately and publicly-from telephones, through radios, televisions. The world was as fully surrounded by voices now as it was by air itself.
And the earth was indeed round. Not a mile of it remained uncharted, unowned, or unnamed. No part of it lay beyond communication because the mysterious waves of telephones, radios, and televisions could be bounced off satellites in space and back to earth again at any locale.