"I was present at the massacre of the male inhabitants of the city of Melos by the Athenians in 416 B.C. Have you read Thucydides?"
"A long time ago,"
"Well, Thucydides had it wrong. He presented it as an out-and-out atrocity, but there were extenuating circumstances. The Melians had been stabbing Athenian soldiers in the back, poisoning them, filling them full of arrows from ambush. Some of them were working for the Spartans and some were on the side of Athens, but the Athenians didn't know which ones they could trust. They didn't want to do any unnecessary killing, but they did want to get back to Athens alive. So they rounded up all the Melian men one day and hacked them to pieces in the town square. The women and children were sold into slavery."
"What did you do?" said Joe. "Were you there with the Athenians?"
"Yes, but I didn't do any killing. I was a chaplain. Of the Erisian denomination, of course. But I was prepared to perform services to Hermes, Dionysus, Heracles, Aphrodite, Athena, Hera and some of the other Olympians. I almost went mad with horror- I didn't understand that Pangenitor is Panphage. I was praying to Eris to deliver me or deliver the Melians or do something, and she answered me."
"Hail, she what done it all," said Simon.
"I almost believe you," said Joe. "But every once in a while the suspicion creeps in that you're simply doing a two-thousand-year-old man routine and the butt of the joke is me."
Malaclypse stood up with a little smile. "Come here, Joe."
"What for?"
"Just come here." Malaclypse held his hands away from his sides, palms turned toward Joe appealingly. Joe walked over and stood before him.
"Put your hand into my side," said Malaclypse.
"Oh, come on," said Joe. Pederastia snickered. Malaclypse just looked at him with a gentle, encouraging smile, so he reached out to touch Malaclypse's shirt. His hands still felt nothing. He closed his eyes to verify that. There was no sensation whatever. Thin air. Eyes still shut, he moved his hand forward. He opened his eyes, and when he saw his arm sunk into Malaclypse's body up to the elbow, he almost barfed his cookies.
He drew back. "It can't be a movie. I'd be almost willing to say a moving holograph, but the illusion is too perfect. You're looking right at me. To my eyes you are unquestionably there."
"Try a few karate chops," said Malaclypse. Joe obliged, swinging his hand like a scythe through Malaclypse's waist, chest and head. For a finale, Joe brought his hand straight down through the top of the being's head.
"I suspend judgment," said Joe. "Maybe you are what you say you are. But it's pretty hard to take. Can you feel anything?"
"I can create temporary sensory organs for myself whenever I want to. I can enjoy just about anything a human enjoys or experiences. But my primary mode of perception is a very advanced form of what you would call intuition. Intuition is a kind of sensitivity in the mind to events and processes; what I have is a highly developed intuitional receptor which is completely controllable."
Joe went back and sat down, shaking his head. "You certainly are in an enviable position."
"Like I said, it's the real reason for human sacrifice," said Malaclypse. He, too, sat down, and Joe now noticed that the soft upholstery of his chair didn't sink beneath his weight. He seemed to rest on the surface of the cushions. "Any sudden or violent death releases a burst of consciousness energy, which can be controlled and channeled as any explosive energy can be. The Illuminati would all like to become as gods. That has been their ambition for longer than I care to say."
"Which means they have to perpetrate mass murder," said Joe, thinking of nuclear weapons, gas chambers, chemical-biological warfare.
Malaclypse nodded. "Now, I don't disapprove of that on moral grounds, since morals are purely illusory. I do have a personal distaste for that sort of thing. Although, when you've lived as long as I have, you have lost so many friends and lovers that it is impossible not to take the deaths of humans as a matter of course. So it goes. And, since I achieved my own immortality and nonmateriality as the result of a mass murder, it would be hypocritical of me to condemn the Illuminati. For that matter, I don't condemn hypocrisy, though it is also personally distasteful to me. But I do say that the method of the Illuminati is stupid and wasteful, since everybody is already everything. So, why fuck around with things? It is absurd to try to be something else when there is nothing else."
"That kind of statement is simply beyond my comprehension," said Joe. "I don't know, maybe it's my engineering training. But even after my own partial illumination in San Francisco with Dr. Iggy, this kind of talk doesn't make any more sense than Christian Science to me."
