Read Ebook: Phoenix by Bradley Marion Zimmer White Ted Finlay Virgil Illustrator

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Ebook has 73 lines and 6912 words, and 2 pages

It was an icy shock, a rejection like a flood of ice, thrusting him back into the wild senselessness of his sudden mad universe. He felt only the desolation of being alone. He wept, feeling the tears on his cheek.

Did God cry?

Crying? Clutching desperately at this frigid slip of a girl for salvation, when the whole universe awaited him? He pushed himself up, away from her; he heard her voice as if from a great distance, making words, but he was past words.

His mind shattered into a thousand crystals, reflecting prismatically pounding emotions he could not directly face. He looked at Fran, into her, through her, beyond her.

He saw; not the immobilized figure of a frightened woman, her body helpless beneath his own on the sofa. In fact, he saw not even the sofa.

It offended him. It was vulgar, teeming, unruly, impossible! He began to reach out to it....

"MAX!"

A body had flung itself at him, kicking, scratching, screaming. He was toppled back and suddenly lying on the floor, back in the narrow confines of a single body again. His head rang and her words were slowly becoming words again.

And then she had flung herself through the door and was gone, her running footsteps growing fainter on the stairs.

Slowly, Max surrendered himself to a chair, without any awareness of his human motions. The old chair enveloped him with the old overstuffed cushioned arms and gave him a musty embrace and for a moment he was part of all its enfolding past, the weariness that had come into its unrejecting depths for comfort and rest. His face was still wet with the tears he had shed before, and now they began to swell and flow again, erupting and cascading almost without volition.

Fran was gone.

And so his vast paranormal powers were meaningless, because the physical universe itself was without meaning. Ordered, yes. Finely structured. But with no more meaning than an alarm clock. He could be God, and yet the only safety and sanity he had felt was when Fran drew him back from the brink of the bewildering nothingness into the shelter of her breast.

The sun had set and he had turned none of the lights on. The gloom of dusk settled, blanketing his body with darkness and his mind with despair.

If Fran--If. A meaningless word now. If Fran had only accepted him--if he could control his own emotions as easily as the magic-show flames he had donned! But he had feared to surrender himself to any emotion, he had given too little of himself to Fran--and when the moment of his need came, she had nothing of him that could call him back safe from the borderland of bleak despair.

He wasn't fit. Like a baby given a straight razor, he could not cope with his gift, and the outcome was inevitable. There was only one answer.

Best do it now.

Suddenly the darkness was pierced by flames, a flickering, growing fire which enveloped and covered his body. His clothes vanished in a flare of flame, spreading to and attacking the soft upholstery of the chair.

He sat for long moments, crowned in golden flames, lost in contemplation of the streams of superheated glowing ions radiated from the burning carbon. Then the chair shifted as cloth burned through, fibre straps released their hold on the metal springs of the seat.

Time.

Deliberately, without emotion, he released his hold on the lines of force which demarcated the limits of his body.

His hair vanished instantly in a shower of sparks and simultaneously a furnace blast beat in on him. Then his skin was blistering and blackening; gone. He collapsed into his funeral pyre, flinging out limbs in reflex spasm and struggle, and he was....

He lived. He was aware. He was everything in his world and still nothing; streams of force, patterns of sub-atomic flux. He was a moment when all fear and all perception had vanished, blending into a gestalt that was more than himself....

In her uneasy sleep, Francine floated five inches above the surface of her bed.

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