Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
Yes, it was as true now as it had been that other time. He lowered his skip-arm into the shaft, crushed the glowing ore and scooped great handfuls up into his blast-furnace belly. Suddenly, delight at defying G.O.D., Inc., coursed through him, and he seized more ore and dumped it into charger pans and fed them into his hearth-bath. He prepared a charge for EV, and when he turned toward her, she was waiting. He felt the warmth of her, the wanting; and the wanting awoke reciprocal wanting. Flames leaped up with the first charge, played weirdly over their joined metallic bodies. Steel of my steel, he thought. Melt of my melt....
Days later, foraging for ore with which to build their homestead, they came upon the abandoned Boa 9. The footings of the neglected base had already been covered by the rampaging wind, and the Raphael had departed Earthward. G.O.D.'s wrath over their dereliction had known no bounds, but all G.O.D. had been able to do in the way of retribution was to set up a self-maintaining force-field around the edenite deposit. On Jupiter, however, there were many Edens....
The Boa 9, now that its controller had absconded from the Jovian heavens, had something of the aspect of an empty snake-skin. They left it where it was, and went about their business. Neither of them knew their nakedness, and neither ever would. Godhead can be something more than a guilt complex arising from a knowledge of good and evil—it can also be the sense of completion that results from the ability to impart life.
That evening, the setting sun turned the omnipresent murk into a burnt orange, and the ragged hills came very close to being beautiful. It was an appropriate moment for EV to say what she had to say.
Not long thereafter she brought forth into the light of day the first child born of M.A.N. and W.O.M.A.N., and life at last took root on the fifth planet from the sun.
THE END