Voice of the Beloved. The cover, soaked through with
wine, tore away; Bertram felt himself pulled gently
forward...
CHAPTER ONE: THE SIGN OF JONAH
The web closed. Bertram crossed slowly back to the
kitchen, the coverless, wine-stained book in his hands. He
started another pot of coffee, called in sick, then unplugged
the telephone from the wall.
He didn't want to be disturbed.
For what seemed the first time ever, Bertram slept a full,
dreamless night. He woke up before the alarm sounded. He
felt great.
Screw you, Kurtz, he thought giddily. He danced lightly
to the kitchen, ignored the little Braun, and poured, instead,
a tall glass of orange juice. He sat down at the table, picked
up the tattered copy of Voice of the Beloved, and smiled.
He tossed it into the living room. Nothing shattered.
The second book had been straightforward
autobiography - sort of. In it, Kurtz claimed that
Cosmogenesis had been autobiographical, that The Icthus
was real, and that he'd gone back, after the last pages of the
first novel, to reactivate it. The Icthus, once running, turned
out to be a sort of metaphysical teaching machine. Its
computer banks contained the original blueprints for
Creation - a Creation which, after a zillion years of entropy,
was running down. Icthus' mission, Kurtz claimed, was to
start Creation over, to generate a New Creation, a new
universe, using Mankind as its source material. The
mystery-substance Icthus carried was refined evolutionary
energy, stored as Cosmic Information. Once this info-
energy was absorbed by human beings, once ingested and
