I felt no recriminations. I had given her the way out--if she had
wanted to take it. The fact that she did not, was none of my doing;
besides, as an unreal being, she did not matter one way or the other.
In the outmoded theories, every existing item has two things. It has
essence and quididity. Or, put into more simple terms, it has whatness
and thatness. Gloria, along with everyone else, had whatness. She had
an essence. But she lacked thatness--she had no quididity.
I told her she did not exist. And as a mere essence creature with
nothing of quid--she stopped existing, abruptly and painlessly. One
moment Gloria was, the next, she wasn’t.
3
This has unfortunate repercussions. It caused the death--I suppose it
is the equivalent of death, you take away the quididity and you take
away all that is really important--of nearly every pretty girl in the
vicinity. You see, I lacked one thing which Phil had--I lacked his
charm; so the girls spurned me. When they spurned me, I took their
existence away. They had no right to spurn me, and thus did not merit
their quididity.
After a while, I became bored with the whole idea, anyway; what did
a woman have to offer but the pleasures of the flesh? And are the
pleasures of the flesh alone significant? That was silly, and, with
some effort, I could show it to mankind.
I willed woman out of existence. All women. Everything that was human
and at the same time female. Don’t misunderstand--I did not hate women;
I was just bored, and I wanted to show the world there was more to life.
I became aware of my oversight later. With no women there could be no
reproduction, and I had, in effect, destroyed the human race. Then, I
had to smile. What did it matter? They did not really exist. I alone
existed, and from the very nature of my existence, alone in all the
world, I was an inferred immortal. The destruction of a means of
reproduction would be quite meaningless to me.
* * * * *
And meanwhile, I was amused by the situation. I don’t know how many men
went insane those first few days; suddenly, without reason, without
explanation, all their womenfolk were taken away. They ceased to exist.
The human race was now uni-sexual--and it had only a limited number of
years left, anyway. Scientists tried to figure it out, but they got
nowhere. Over one billion people--all female, suddenly disappeared. No
one saw another female again, any place, any time; the scientists were
stumped.
But some of the cultists had a holiday. We had been living the life
of flesh and sin too long, and now we were being punished. Oh, this
was not said by the true religions--they had no answer, and, like the
scientists, they merely told us that God, in His infinite wisdom, did
what was best. The scientists closed up shop and went home. At that
point, perhaps sooner, they had begun to bore me--and I willed them out
of existence. Every scientist. Every last one. And you’d be surprised
to learn that that can take in a lot of people. With women gone, no one
noticed the disappearance of the scientists as a unit.
4
It is an odd paradox. I could destroy but I could not recreate, and,
having destroyed, I wanted to repent. But there was no way I could
recreate women.
The whole world, as a consequence, bored me. I went home that night and
I got drunk; then I willed the world out of existence.
All of it; all, of course, but me. I floated off into the void, and the
sun had only eight planets.
My body became cumbersome. I just floated. I willed my body out of
existence--it was only a figment of my imagination, anyway. Then
I could travel at the speed of thought itself--I could leave that
laggard, light, far far behind.
But first I had a job to do. I looked at Mercury. Scorched on
one side, frozen on the other, it was dead. Venus was a world of
swamps--primitive, uninteresting life. Mars had an old and a dead
culture, a dying world now. Nothing beyond-- The solar system of eight
planets bored me. I willed it out of existence.
The sun looked all alone. I destroyed it.
* * * * *
The Centauri double-star system was even worse. No life there at all,
not even planets. I passed it by in a huff, putting an end to its
useless existence.
On a planet circling Deneb, hundreds of light years away, I found
humanoid life. It was easy to will an essence-without-quididity out of
existence and take over its body. I did, but unfortunately, I did not
know the ways of this world. They adjudged me insane and they put me
in what I suppose was an asylum for the insane. It was interesting at
first, but after a time, I became bored with it.