SON CARRIAD KNEW almost everything about the sky he was looking up at (though it was dilated through a prism, chanelled through a thousand miles of crystals from the Antarctic surface to their deep subterrenean vault.) With nearly ten billion years of life experiences, and telepathic access to all of the accumulated knowledge of the LifeForce, he could give a detailed description of each of the star systems whose light pierced the icy darkness above him. Hell, he had been to half of them at some time or another -- either personally or via the vast tentacles of the HiveMind. With all of this knowledge you'd think Carriad would have found a more exciting hobby than slumping over the periscope eyepiece in his lonely rock salon, just gazing at all those stars. Son Carriad could download 10 billion years of sensory pleasures to get his kicks, pleasures and leisures of every conceivable decadence and dimension (hissing lizard sex on a sulfur-grained beach). But he had more important things to do. Like gazing up at those aforementioned stars.

It's true he thought bleakly one afternoon, it was just before the Eruption. My eyes are always focussed outward, into Space, away from the Source.

The point of light in the sky above Antarctica which Carriad had locked his gaze on at that moment was the one he knew the least about, since it had existed for only about 50 days or so. A dim sparkle of reflected sun, Nimbus 1 was the latest space station the Upworlders had put into orbit, to demonstrate their impending conquest of the Universe. What fools Carriad thought, remembering those Ming the Merciless words from Flash Gordon: "Pathetic earthlings, scattering your bodies out into the void. If you knew anything about the real nature of the Universe, anything at all, you would scuttle from it in terror." But Carriad knew, he knew the truth that Ming could never express -- the demons existed but they lived within, not without. Space was an illusion, a trick of the eye, a fallacy born of the seperative consciousness of Man. The only direction was in -- the stars in the periscope were just reflections of the light of the One Star that was inside, just an inch below the eyeball. You could never reach the stars by going out, there was just trillions of miles of empty vacuum -- and the pot at the end of the rainbow never existed.

This the humans will learn -- the new perspective, the new geometry Carriad thought. He chuckled to think the new Messiah would not be a warrior or politician or even a mystic -- just an angst-ridden artist. Well he thought the time has come for change.