He still could. A weight in his lungs where there'd not been weight before. He backed 
towards the door, knowing that if he stayed the fucker would have the better of him.
  "Don't leave," Kissoon said. "Don't open the door."
  "There's other ways to the Art," Jaffe said.
  "No," Kissoon said. "Only me. The rest are dead There's nobody can help you but me."
  He tried that little smile of his, bowing his wretched body, but the humility was as 
much a sham as the fear had been. All tricks to keep his victim near, so as to have his 
flesh and blood. Jaffe wasn't buying the routine a second time. He tried to block out 
Kissoon's seductions with memories. Pleasures taken, that he'd take again if he could 
only get out of this trap alive. The woman in Illinois, the one-armed man in Idaho, the 
caress of roaches. The recollections kept Kissoon from getting any further hold on him. 
He reached behind him and grabbed the door handle.
  "Don't open that," Kissoon said.
  "I'm getting out of here."
  "I made a mistake. I'm sorry. I underestimated you. We can come to some arrangement 
surely? I'll tell you all you want to know. I'll teach you the Art. I don't have the 
skill myself. Not in the Loop. But you could have it. You could take it with you. Out 
there. Back into the world. Arm in the pie! Only stay. Stay, Jaffe. I've been alone here 
a long time. I need company. Someone to explain it all to. Share it with."
  Jaffe turned the handle. As he did so he felt the earth beneath his feet shudder, and a 
brightness seemed to appear momentarily beyond the door. It seemed too livid to be mere 
daylight, but it must have been, because there was only sun awaiting him on the step 
outside.
  "Don't leave me!" he heard Kissoon yelling, and with the yell felt the man clutching at 
his innards the way he had bringing him here. But the hold was nowhere near as strong as 
it had been. Either Kissoon had burned up too much of his energy in attempting to breathe 
his spirit into Jaffe, or his fury was weakening him. Whichever, the hold was 
resist-able, and the farther Jaffe ran the weaker it became.
  A hundred yards from the hut he glanced back, and thought he saw a patch of darkness 
moving across the ground towards him, like dark rope uncurling. He didn't linger to 
discover what new trick the old bastard was mounting, but ran and ran, following his own 
trail across the ground, until the steel tower came in sight. Its presence suggested some 
attempt to populate this wasteland, long abandoned. Beyond it, an aching hour later, was 
further proof of that endeavor. The town he half-remembered staggering through on his way 
here, its street empty not only of people and vehicles but of any distinguishing marks 
whatsoever, like a film-set yet to be dressed for shooting.
  Half a mile beyond it an agitation in the air signalled that he had reached the 
perimeters of the Loop. He braved its confusions willingly, passing through a place of 
sickening disorientation in which he was not certain he was even walking, and suddenly he 
was out the other side, and back in a calm, starlit night.
  Forty-eight hours later, drunk in an alleyway in Santa Fe, he made two momentous 
decisions. One, that he'd keep the beard he'd grown in the last few weeks, as a reminder 
of his search. Two, that every wit he possessed, every hint of knowledge he'd gained 
about the occult life of America, every iota of power his astral eyes lent him, would go 
to the possessing of the Art (Fuck Kissoon; Fuck the Shoal), and that only when he'd got 
it would he once again show his face unshaven.
  
  IV
  HOLDING to the promises he'd made himself was not easy. Not when there were so many 
simple pleasures to be had from the power he'd gained; pleasures he made himself forfeit 
for fear of depleting his little strength before he stole his way to greater.
  His first priority was to locate a fellow quester; someone who could aid him in his 
search. It was two months before his enquiries threw up the name and reputation of a man 
perfectly suited to that role. That man was Richard Wesley Fletcher, who'd been-until his 
recent fall from grace-one of the most lauded and revolutionary minds in the field of 
evolutionary studies; the head of several research programs in Boston and Washington; a 
theorist whose every remark was scrutinized by his peers for clues to his next 
breakthrough. But his genius had been flawed by addiction. Mescaline and its derivatives 
had brought him low, much to the satisfaction of many of his colleagues, who made no 
bones about their contempt for the man once his guilty secret came out. In article after 
article Jaffe found the same smug tone, as the academic community rounded on the deposed 
Wunderkind, condemning his theories as ludicrous and his morals as reprehensible. Jaffe 
couldn't have cared less about Fletcher's moral standing. It was the man's theories that 
intrigued him, dovetailing as they did with his own ambition. Fletcher's researches had 
been aimed at isolating, and synthesizing in a laboratory, the force in living organisms 
that drove them to evolve. Like Jaffe, he believed heaven could be stolen.
  It took persistence to find the man, but Jaffe had that in abundance, and found him in 
Maine. The genius was much the worse for despair, teetering on the brink of complete 
mental breakdown. Jaffe was cautious. He didn't press his suit at first, but instead 
ingratiated himself by supplying drugs of a quality Fletcher had long since been too poor 
to afford. Only when he'd gained the addict's trust did he begin to make oblique 
reference to Fletcher's studies. Fletcher was less than lucid on the subject at first, 
but Jaffe gently fanned the embers of his obsession, and in time the fire flared. Once 
burning, Fletcher had much to tell. He believed he'd twice come close to isolating what 
he called the Nuncio, the messenger. But the final processes had always eluded him. Jaffe 
offered a few observations of his own on the subject, garnered from his readings in the 
occult. The two of them, he gently suggested, were fellow seekers. Though he, Jaffe, used 
the vocabulary of the ancients-of alchemists and magicians-and Fletcher the language of 
science, they had the same desire to nudge evolution's elbow; to advance the flesh, and 
perhaps the spirit, by artificial means. Fletcher poured scorn on these observations at 
the outset, but slowly came to value them, finally accepting Jaffe's offer of facilities 
in which to begin his researches afresh. This time, Jaffe promised, Fletcher wouldn't 
have to work in an academic hothouse, constantly required to justify his work to hold on 
to his funding. He guaranteed his dope-fiend genius a place to work that would be well 
hidden from prying eyes. When the Nuncio had been isolated, and its miracle reproduced, 
Fletcher would reappear from the wilderness and put his vilifiers to flight. It was an 
offer no obsessive could have resisted.
  Eleven months later, Richard Wesley Fletcher stood on a granite headland on the Pacific 
Coast of the Baja and cursed himself for succumbing to Jaffe's temptations. Behind him, 
in the Mision de Santa Catrina where he'd labored for the best part of a year, the Great 
Work (as Jaffe liked to call it) had been achieved. The Nuncio was a reality. There were 
surely few less likely places for labors most of the world would have judged ungodly than 
an abandoned Jesuit Mission, but then from the outset this endeavor had been shot through 
with paradox.
  For one, the liaison between Jaffe and himself. For another, the intermingling of 
disciplines that had made the Great Work possible. And for a third the fact that now, in 
what should have been his moment of triumph, he was minutes away from destroying the 
Nuncio before it fell into the hands of the very man who'd funded its creation.
  As in its making, so in its unmaking: system, obsession and pain. Fletcher was too well 
versed in the ambiguities of matter to believe that the total destruction of anything was