Here, in the first days following Raul's successful transmutation, before the full 
realization of the Nuncio's purpose and consequence had soiled Fletcher's triumph, man 
ind boy had sat, and watched the sky, and listened to Mozart together. All the mysteries, 
Fletcher had said, in one of his first lessons, were footnotes to music. Before 
everything, music.
  Now there'd be no more sublime Mozart; no more sky-watching; no more loving education. 
There was only time for a shot. Fletcher took the gun from beside his mescaline in the 
desk drawer.
  "We're going to die?" Raul said.
  He'd known this was coming. But not so soon.
  "Yes."
  "We should go outside," the boy said. "To the edge."
  "No. There isn't time. I've...I've got some work to do before I join you."
  "But you said together."
  "I know."
  "You promised together."
  "Jesus, Raul! I said: I know! But it can't be helped. He's coming. And if he takes you 
from me, alive or dead, he'll use you. He'll cut you up. Find out how the Nuncio works in 
you."
  His words were intended to scare, and they succeeded. Had let out a sob, his face 
knotted up with terror. He took a step backwards as Fletcher raised the gun.
  "I'll be with you soon," Fletcher said. "I swear it. Justas soon as I can."
  "Please, father..."
  "I'm not your father! Once and for all, I'm nobody's father!"
  His outburst broke any hold he had on Raul. Before Fletcher could take a bead on him 
the boy was away through the door. He still fired wildly, the bullet striking the wall, 
then he gave chase, firing a second time. But the boy had simian agility in him. He was 
across the laboratory and out into the sunlight before a third shot could be fired. Out, 
and away.
  Fletcher threw the gun aside. It was a waste of what little time remained to follow 
Raul. Better to use those minutes to dispose of the Nuncio. There was precious little of 
the stuff, but enough to wreak evolutionary havoc in any system that it tainted. He'd 
plotted against it for days and nights now, working out the safest way to be rid of it. 
He knew it couldn't simply be poured away. What might it do if it got into the earth? His 
best hope, he'd decided-indeed his only hope-was to throw it into the Pacific. There was 
a pleasing neatness about that. The long climb to his species' present rung had begun in 
the ocean, and it was there-in the myriad configurations of certain marine animals-that 
he'd first observed the urge things had to become something other than themselves. Clues 
to which the three vials of Nuncio were the solution. Now he'd give that answer back to 
the element that had inspired it. The Nuncio would literally become drops in the ocean, 
its powers so diluted as to be negligible.
  He crossed to the bench where the vials still stood in their rack. God in three 
bottles, milky blue, like a della Francesca sky. There was movement in the distillation, 
as though it was stirring up its own internal tides. And if it knew he was approaching, 
did it also know his intention? He had so little idea of what he'd created. Perhaps it 
could read his mind.
  He stopped in his tracks, still too much the man of science not to be fascinated by 
this phenomenon. He'd known the liquor was powerful, but that it possessed the talent for 
self-fermentation it was now displaying-even a primitive propulsion, it seemed; it was 
climbing the walls of the vials- astonished him. His conviction faltered. Did he really 
have the right to put this miracle out of the world's sight? Was its appetite really so 
unhealthy? All it wanted to do was speed the ascent of things. Make fur of scales. Make 
flesh of fur. Make spirit, perhaps, of flesh. A pretty thought.
  Then he remembered Randolph Jaffe, of Omaha, Nebraska, sometime butcher and opener of 
Dead Letters; collector of other people's secrets. Would such a man use the Nuncio well? 
In the hands of someone sweet-natured and loving, the Great Work might begin a universal 
papacy, every living being in touch with the meaning of its Creation. But Jaffe wasn't 
loving, nor sweet-natured. He was a thief of revelations, a magician who didn't care to 
understand the principles of his craft, only to rise by it.
  Given that fact the question was not did he have the right to dispose of the miracle, 
but rather, how dare he hesitate?
  He stepped towards the vials, charged with fresh conviction. The Nuncio knew he meant 
it harm. It responded with a frenzy of activity, climbing the glass walls as best it 
could, churning against its confines.
  As Fletcher reached out to snatch the rack up, he realized its true intention. It 
didn't simply desire escape. It wanted to work its wonders on the very flesh that was 
plotting its harm.
  It wanted to recreate its Creator.
  The realization came too late to be acted upon. Before he could withdraw his 
outstretched hand, or shield himself, one of the vials shattered. Fletcher felt the glass 
cut his palm, and the Nuncio splash against him. He staggered away from it, raising his 
hand in front of his face. There-were several cuts there, but one particularly large, in 
the middle of his palm, for all the world as though someone had driven a nail through it. 
The pain made him giddy, but it lasted only a moment, giddiness and pain. Coming after 
was another sensation entirely. Not even sensation. That was too trivial a description. 
It was like mainlining on Mozart; a music that bypassed the ears and went straight to the 
soul. Hearing it, he would never be the same again.
  
  
  V
  Randolph had seen the smoke rising from the fires outside the Mission as he rounded the 
first bend in the long haul up the hill, and had confirmed, in that sight, the suspicion 
that had been gnawing in him for days: that his hired genius was in revolt. He revved the 
jeep's engine, cursing the dirt that slid away in powder clouds behind his wheels, 
slowing his ascent to a laboring crawl. Until today it had suited both him and Fletcher 
that the Great Work be accomplished so far from civilization, though it had required a 
good deal of persuasion on his part to get equipped a laboratory of the sophistication 
Fletcher had demanded in a setting so remote. But then persuasion was easy nowadays. The 
trip into the Loop had stoked the fires in Jaffe's eyes. What the woman in Illinois, 
whose name he'd never known, had said: You've seen something extraordinary, haven't you? 
was true now as never before. He'd seen a place out of time, and himself in it, driven 
beyond sanity by his hunger for the Art. People knew all that though they could never 
have put words to the thought. They saw it in his look, and either out of fear or awe 
simply did as he asked.
  But Fletcher had been an exception to that rule from the outset. His peccadilloes, and 
his desperation, had made him pliable, but the man still had a will of his own. Four 
times he'd refused Jaffe's offer to come out of hiding and recommence his experiments, 
though Jaffe had reminded him on each occasion how difficult it had been to trace the 
lost genius, and how much he desired that they work together. He'd sweetened each of the 
four offers by bringing mescaline in modest supply, always promising more, and promising