himself. “Those human souls, at least, which contrive to stay out of your dark clutches.”
The cloud seemed to come to a halt then, in an abyss of space that suddenly seem vertiginous in every direction, where whole systems of stars were reduced to mere points of tentative light. “This is not so awesome,” whispered the Devil, “compared with the emptiness inside an atom, where matter dissolves into animate mathematical entity and uncertainty refuses the definition of solidity. I wish I could show you that, but a human mind’s eye is incapable of such imagination. Trust me when I tell you that there is void within as well as without, and that substance is rarer than you could ever comprehend.”
“There is no void where the Lord is,” Anthony replied, “and the Lord is everywhere—except, I must suppose, in the depths of your rebellious heart, from which He has been rudely cast out.”
As he spoke, though, the hermit became more sharply aware of his thirst for blood: the curse that the Devil had inflicted upon him in order to increase his vulnerability to unreason.
Anthony struggled to keep his next thought unvoiced, but in the end he decided that he had no need to hide from the Devil, while he was still committed to the Lord. “I am a vampire now,” he said, without waiting for any reply to his previous observation, “but I am no more a sinner than I was before. I thirst, but I trust in the Lord to deliver me from evil. I will not drink of human blood, no matter how intense my thirst becomes. If my life is to be a trial by ordeal, then I shall be vindicated.”
“And if you should live forever, unable to die?” the Devil murmured. “What then, my friend? What if your thirst should become as infinite as the abysm of space, never ceasing to increase?”
“Eventually,” Anthony reminded him, “the last star will expend the last of its light, and darkness will fall forever. I shall be safe in the bosom of the Lord.”
The cloud condensed around him then, and moved through him, as if it were turning him inside out or drawing him into a fourth dimension undiscernible by human eyes—but then the dark abyss of intergalactic space was replaced by the familiar gloom of night on Earth. Anthony found himself on the edge of a cliff not far from his fort, kneeling on the bare rock and looking out over the desert dunes.
Anthony bowed his head, and was about to thank the Lord for his deliverance, when he caught sight of a moon-shadow from the corner of his eye. It appeared to be the shadow of a human being, but Anthony knew better than to trust the appearance.
He turned to look at the Devil, who now wore the appearance of an Alexandrian philosopher—an Epicurean, Anthony supposed, rather than a neo-Platonist.
“What now?” the hermit said, glad to be able to speak the words aloud, although his tongue felt thick and the inside of his mouth was parched. “Have you no one else to tempt and torment? I have seen your emptiness, and yet am full. I will no more drink of horror and despair than of human blood. I must suppose that I am a vampire now, but I still have my faith. I shall never be a minion of the Prince of Demons.”
“This is not a contest,” the Devil said, again. “I have nothing to gain or lose by tempting you. I do not need and do not want your soul, your heart or your affection.”
“And yet, you seem to have a thirst of some sort,” Anthony observed. “Perhaps you are a vampire too, avid for human blood in spite of your best intentions.”
“There is a thirst,” the Devil admitted, “and it might be mine. Have you ever met the Sphinx, my friend, in your lonely fort? Has she ever asked you her riddle? Her true riddle, I mean; not the one contrived by Sophocles.”
“I have never met a Sphinx,” Anthony said, rising to his feet and brushing the dust from the hem of his ragged coat, “but if I ever did, I would know you in that guise, and I would answer you then as I answer you now: I trust in the Lord, and Jesus Christ is my savior. I fear no possible consequence of that declaration.”
“And yet there are heretics already within the Christian company,” the Devil said. “There is division, disharmony and distrust even among those who worship the One God and accept the same savior. If you could see the future...but I dare say that you would see it as selectively as you see the present, filtered by the lens of faith. They will call you saint if you preach in Alexandria and write letters to the Emperor Constantine when you are done here. You will be the stuff of legend, and I shall not be entirely blameless in that, should I fail in my endeavor—but the vampire’s bite is your secret and mine, and will remain so. History always has its secrets, and a world like yours has more than its share, since it uses writing so sparingly.” Anthony could look into the Devil’s eyes again now, and could see that they were as restless as they had been before, although their pain seemed to have been dulled. He saw the Devil lick his lips, as if to moisten them against the dry and bitter wind that blew from the dunes.
“The scriptures are a gift from the Lord,” Anthony said, although he knew that no defense was necessary. “The commandments are preserved there, as they need to be now that the Ark of the Covenant is lost.”
“Writing is an awkward instrument,” the Devil remarked. “Without measurement and calculation, linear reasoning and syntactical complexity, science is impossible—but the learning of letters and numbers requires specialist teachers, and the custodians of culture inevitably become jealous of the privilege the control, establishing themselves as arbiters of faith. Their empire is fragile, though; once a man is taught to read, he is better equipped to think...and to doubt.”
Anthony’s eyes were scanning the eastern horizon, searching for the twilight that would precede the dawn, but there was no sign of it. There must still be several hours of night remaining. He licked his own lips, thirsty now for more than blood.
“I want to show you the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle,” the Devil said, softly. “The riddle of life and death, of growth and ageing, of competition and selection. I cannot force you to read its significance, but I shall write it in your eyes regardless.”
“I am weary,” Anthony admitted, “but you cannot defeat me. My thirst may be a torment, but it keeps me alert to your wiles.” “Look,” said the Father of Lies, pointing out into the shadowed desert, where the dunes had begun to stir and shift.
Anthony knew that moonlight could play tricks in the desert night. The haze that blurred the air by day seemed to disappear by night, but the fugitive light was deceptive nevertheless.
It seemed to him that the fine sand eddied into life, and that its motes, at first dissociated, began to cleave together into imitations of complex organic forms: leaves and tubers, worms and mites, slugs and crabs, trees and snakes. He saw all these creatures growing from tiny seeds and eggs into complex forms that produced more seeds and eggs, each generation dying off as the next emerged. He saw that, in order to grow, the creatures fed upon one another, not randomly but in measured and defined ways. Even the sedentary plants, whose only necessary nourishment was wind and sunlight, accepted the substance of the decaying dead into their own flesh, so that nothing that might be incorporate in flesh was lost or wasted, but always recycled and transfigured. He saw that the feeding was always competitive, and that there was also competition to delay the moment when the living became food, so that no succeeding generation was exactly the same as the one that had gone before.
Everything was changing, and would continue to change. Creation was continuous, and would never be complete.
Anthony saw, then, that the human species was a product of this process of ceaseless change, and deduced that the human species was no more immune to further change than any other. He understood that
