"A pulsating puddle of pale pink protoplasm!" Kore laughed at her own alliteration. She and Naga were in Dema's Jeep, on their way home from the clinic. She and Roger had recovered, and Roger had left to go home on his own.

Then she turned serious for a moment. "But gosh, Dema, that was a close one. What if Chaos had known you might recover? You were defenseless."

Dema shuddered a bit at the thought, but said, "Fortunately she didn't know. She had no true spiritual awareness. She was a trickster, an illusionist, playing upon the ability of others to follow where she led. She could conjure a convincing dreamscape, but it was all mechanics to her."

"You speak of her in the past tense," said Naga, "But you let her go."

"She is her own worst enemy," said Dema. "No prison could hold her, the other prisoners and even the guards would quickly come under her spell. But on her own, with the fear of the Lamia in her, she is nearly helpless.

"One bit of her paranoia is partly true. The Bureau and the DEA have contacts everywhere. If she tries to start up again, the slightest incident will link her to my report, and she will be undone."

"You can write a report on this for the DEA?" asked Naga.

A sly smile played on Dema's lips. "I have a reputation for picking up a lot of street talk," she said. "A forensics team will go through what she left behind."

"But we don't have to count on the DEA, right, Dema?" Kore asked. "The Lamia will know."

"I have been in intimate contact with her, it is true. We are connected. The Lamia will know."

After a period of silence, Kore turned to Dema again and said, "Poor Roger. After tonight he realized what was really going on and told us all about it.

"Chaos had been messing with his head. She persuaded him that our clinic might be a front, linked to the drug establishment. She wanted him to help her expose us, and got him to mess up some things on purpose.

"He started withholding Naga's vitamin treatments from some patients, because Chaos said they were unnatural. Then when they had relapses he started making anonymous reports to the DEA, even though he had actually caused them himself.

"Chaos told Roger she was so pleased with him that she wanted him to go to a special meeting, and that he should bring me along. Roger had never seen this part of the ritual, it was only done before an Inner Circle of the faithful, so he thought we were being especially honored. That's how he coaxed me to go with him. We were being honored all right. We were being sacrificed! What an honor that is."

"Memes again," Naga said. "Chaos had invoked a special reality. Many primitive people had cultural beliefs that convinced them that ritual sacrifice was necessary to ensure spiritual renewal. Archaeological excavations of some ancient burial places have uncovered scores of bodies of people who had gone willingly to an early grave because of such beliefs."

"That doesn't make it right," said Dema grimly. "That has never made it right. And likely it was just such people as Chaos who instigated those rites, to increase their own power over their fellows. I strongly suspect that, even now, Chaos doesn't understand that she herself is a prime example of the type of people she has been railing against."

"I think memes are like germs," said Kore. "They're contagious, and can spread from one person to the next until they infect a whole group."

Naga nodded. "Yes, and the people who get infected by bad ideas are the ones who are most susceptible, who are predisposed by ideas they already have to agree with the new ones."

"Chaos was infecting the weak," said Dema, "People who have troubles they can't handle and want to blame someone else for them.

"The modern world is a challenging place, not because survival is hard, but because it is so easy. People thrive on challenge, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, and they keep finding new challenges to respond to, not in the natural world but in the cultural world, the world of the mind. They do some bizarre things just to keep life interesting.

"Chaos is wrong about the ancient times having been a golden age. Life may have been simple for most people then, but the mental and spiritual challenges available were far more limited than they are now. I think if there ever was a Golden Age, we're in it."

They pulled up in front of the town house and Sedna came out to hug her two granddaughters close. Then she led them into her sitting room. They had been through another adventure, she knew, but she had not been part of it. They had a story to tell.