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  “No,” he murmured. In the yellow gleam he saw the faces of Beryl and Mirabel and Lureen. “You shouldn’t have done this to me. You’re torturing me… like you would a fly…”

  There was no response. They sent him away, back to Earth. They returned him to the travertine towers and the rumbling slidewalks, to the house of pleasure on 485th Street, to the islands of light that blazed in the sky, to the eleven billion people. They turned him loose to go among them, and suffer, and report on his sufferings. And a time would come when they would release him, but not yet.

  * * *

  Here is Cassiday: nailed to his cross.

  Afterword

  One of the first science fiction stories I wrote was a deadly grim portrayal of a New York compelled into cannibalism. It was sufficiently realistic so that no one would buy it for four years, and only an inspired promotion job by the editor of this present anthology got it into print at all.

  Now, twelve or thirteen years later, I’ve turned from the literal depiction of cannibalism to the symbolic presentation of vampirism, which I suppose indicates a healthy progression of morbidity. Every writer returns to his own obsessions when given a free hand, and every situation he invents, no matter how grotesque, says something about the nature of human relationships. If I seem to be saying that we devour each other, literally or figuratively, that we drain substance from one another, that we practice vampirism and cannibalism, so be it. Beneath any grotesquerie lies its opposite; behind the grimness of cannibalism lies the video sentimentality, “People need people.” To devour, if nothing else.

  No apologies offered. No excuses. Just a story, a made-up fiction, a fantasy about future times and other worlds. Nothing more than that.

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