Like the sound of ten thousand junked, rusty automobiles being stirred by one giant wooden spoon, Glimmung heaved himself up and onto the raised stage at the far end of the conference room. His body quivered and shuddered, and from deep inside him a moan became audible. The moan grew, rose, until it became a shriek. An animal, Joe thought. Caught, perhaps, in a trap. One paw. And it's trying to get loose but the trap is too complicated. And, at the same time, a great spewing forth of brackish sea water, trash fish, aquatic mammals, sea kelp -- the room reeked with the roar and shock of the sea. And, in the center of all of it, the churning lump which was Glimmung.
"The hotel people aren't going to like this," Joe said half aloud. Good god -- the huge mass of fluttering extremities, the whipping, writhing arms which flung themselves at every spot on the gigantic carcass... the whole thing heaved, and then, with a furious roar, it collapsed the floor beneath it; the mass disappeared from sight, leaving remnants of the sea all over the room. From the gaping chasm smokelike tendrils, probably steam, fizzled upward. But Glimmung was gone. As Mali had predicted, his weight had been too great. Glimmung was down in the basement of the hotel, ten floors below them.
Joe took a large, deep, steadying breath and said, "Are you going to pay the hotel compensation? For the damage you've done?"
"My check," Glimmung said, "will be in the mail by tomorrow morning."
"What am I like?" Glimmung said.
"Don't you know?" Joe said.
"No creature knows itself," Glimmung said. "You don't know yourself; you don't have any knowledge, none at all, of your most basic potentials. Do you understand what the Raising will mean for you? Everything that has been latent, has been potential, in you -- all of it will become actualized. Everyone who conspires in the Raising, everyone involved, from a hundred planets tossed here and their in the galaxy -- everyone will be. You have never been, Joe Fernright. You merely exist. To be is to do. And we will do a great thing, Joe Fernright." Glimmung's voice rang like steel.
Back to WA's home page |
Back to Quintessential Quotations page |
Back to the Sci-Fi Sampler TOC |
Up to the top of this page