"Because it doesn't operate the way I thought it would. It's not interested in the 
flesh, Jaffe, except as an afterthought. It's the mind it plays with. It takes thought 
for its inspiration, and runs with that. Makes us what we'd hope to be, or fear we are. 
Or both. Maybe both."
  "You haven't changed," Jaffe observed. "Still sound the same."
  "But I'm talking in your head," Fletcher reminded him. "Did I ever do that before?"
  "So, telepathy's in the future of the species," Jaffe replied. "No surprise there. 
You've just accelerated the process. Leap-frogged a few thousand years."
  "Will I be sky?" Fletcher said again. "That's what I want to be."
  "Then be it," Jaffe said. "I've got more ambition than that."
  "Yes. Yes, you have, more's the pity. That was why I tried to keep it out of your 
hands. Stop it using you. But it distracted me. I saw the window open and I couldn't keep 
away. The Nuncio made me so dreamy. Made me sit, and wonder: will I...will I be sky?"
  "It stopped you cheating me," Jaffe said. "It wants to be used, that's all."
  "Mmmm."
  "So where's the rest? You didn't take it all."
  "No," Fletcher said. The power to deceive had been sluiced from him. "But please, 
don't..."
  "Where?" Jaffe said, advancing into the room now. "You've got it on you?"
  He felt myriad tiny brushes against his skin as he stepped forward, as though he'd 
walked into a dense cloud of invisible gnats. The sensation should have warned him 
against tackling Fletcher, but he was too eager for the Nuncio to take notice. He put his 
fingers on the man's shoulder. Upon contact the figure seemed to fly apart, a cloud of 
motes-gray, white and red-breaking against him like a pollen storm.
  In his head he heard the genius begin to laugh, not, Jaffe knew, at his expense but at 
the sheer liberation of shrugging off this skin of dulling dust, which had begun to 
gather upon him at birth, accruing steadily until all but the brightest hints of 
brightness were stopped. Now, when the dust blew away, Fletcher was still sitting in the 
chair as he had been. But now he was incandescent.
  "I am too bright?" he said. "I'm sorry."
  He turned down his flame.
  "I want this too!" Jaffe said. "I want it now."
  "I know," Fletcher replied. "I can taste your need. Messy, Jaffe, messy. You're 
dangerous. I don't think I ever really knew till now how dangerous you are. I can see you 
inside out. Read your past." He stopped for a moment, then let out a long, pained moan. 
"You killed a man," he said.
  "He deserved it."
  "Stood in your way. And this other I'm seeing...Kis-soon is it? Did he die too?"
  "No."
  "But you'd like to have done it? I can taste hatred in you."
  "Yes, I'd have killed him if I'd had the chance." He smiled.
  "And me as well, I think," Fletcher said. "Is that a knife in your pocket," he asked, 
"or are you just pleased to see me?"
  "I want the Nuncio," Jaffe said. "I want it, and it wants me..."
  He turned away. Fletcher called after him.
  "It works on the mind, Jaffe. Maybe on the soul. Don't you understand? Nothing outside 
that doesn't begin inside. Nothing real that isn't dreamed first. Me? I never wanted my 
body except as a vehicle. Never really wanted anything at all, except to be sky. But you, 
Jaffe. You! Your mind's full of shit. Think of that. Think what the Nuncio's going to 
magnify. I beg you-"
  The entreaty, breathed in his skull, made Jaffe halt a moment, and look back at the 
portrait. It had risen from its chair, though by the expression on Fletcher's face it was 
a torment to tear himself away from the view.
  "I beg you," he said again. "Don't let it use you."
  Fletcher extended a hand towards Jaffe's shoulder, but he retreated out of touching 
range, stepping through into the laboratory. His eyes almost instantly came to rest on 
the bench and the two vials left in the rack, their contents boiling up against the glass.
  "Beautiful," Jaffe said, and stepped towards them, the Nuncio leaping up in the vials 
at his approach, like a dog wanting to lick its master's face. Its fawning made a lie of 
Fletcher's fears. He, Randolph Jaffe, was the user in this exchange. The Nuncio, the used.
  In his head, Fletcher continued to issue his warning:
  "Every cruelty in you, Jaffe, every fear, every stupidity, every cowardice. All making 
you over. Are you prepared for that? I don't think so. It'll show you too much."
  "No such thing as too much," Jaffe said, tuning the protests out and reaching for the 
nearest of the vials. The Nuncio couldn't wait. It broke the glass, its contents jumping 
to meet his skin. His knowledge (and his terror) were instantaneous, the Nuncio 
communicating its message on contact. The moment Jaffe realized Fletcher was right was 
the same moment he became powerless to correct the error.
  The Nuncio had little or no interest in changing the order of his cells. If that 
happened it would only be as a consequence of a profounder alteration. It viewed his 
anatomy as a cul-de-sac. What minor improvements it could make in the system were beneath 
its notice. It wasn't going to waste time sophisticating finger-joints or taking the 
kinks out of the lower bowel. It was an evangelist not a beautician. Mind was its target. 
Mind which used body for its gratification, even when that gratification harmed the 
vehicle. Mind which was the source of the hunger for transformation and its most ardent 
and creative agent.
  Jaffe wanted to beg for help, but the Nuncio had already taken control of his cortex, 
and he was prevented from uttering a word. Prayer was no more plausible. The Nuncio was 
God. Once in a bottle; now in his body. He couldn't even die, though his system shook so 
violently it seemed ready to throw itself apart. The Nuncio forbade everything but its 
work. Its awesome, perfecting work.
  Its first act was to throw his memory into reverse, shooting him back through his life 
from the moment it touched him, piercing each event until he struck the waters of his 
mother's womb. He was granted a moment of agonizing nostalgia for that place-its calm, 
its safety-before his life came to drag him out again, and began the return journey, 
revisiting his little life in Omaha. From the beginning of his conscious life there'd 
been so much rage. Against the petty and the politic; against the achievers and the 
seducers, the ones who made the girls and the grades. He felt it all over again, but 
intensified: like a cancer cell getting fat in the flick of an eye, distorting him. He 
saw his parents fading away, and him unable to hold on to them, or-when they'd gone-to 
mourn them, but raged nevertheless, not knowing why they'd lived, or bothered to bring 
him into the world. He fell in love again, twice. Was rejected again, twice. Nurtured the 
hurt, decorated the scars, let the rage grow fatter and fatter. And between those notable 
lows the perpetual grind of jobs that he couldn't hold, and people who forgot his name 
day after day, and Christmases coming on Christmases, and only age to mark them. Never 
getting closer to understanding why he'd been made-why anyone was made, when everything 
was a cheat and a sham and went to nothing anyway.
  Then, the room at the crossroads, filled with Dead Letters, and suddenly his rage had 
echoes from coast to coast, wild, bewildered people like him stabbing at their confusion 
and hoping to see sense when it bled. Some of them had. They'd tumbled mysteries, albeit