The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny

heroes and the less-than-heroes; it was the place that she loved, and she saw there the only man whose face she knew, walking, symbol-studded, upon its surface.… To take up arms against a sea of troubles, ill-met by moonlight, and by opposing end them—who hath called forth the mutinous winds, and ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault set roaring war—for those are pearls that were his eyes… What a piece of work is a man! Infinite in faculty, in form and in moving!
    She knew him in all his roles, who could not exist without an audience. He was Life.
    He was the Shaper…
    He was the Maker and the Mover.
    He was greater than heroes.
    A mind may hold many things. It learns. It cannot teach itself not to think, though.
    Emotions remain the same, qualitatively, throughout life; the stimuli to which they respond are subject to quantitative variations, but the feelings are stock in trade.
    This why the theater survives: it is cross-cultural; it contains the North Pole and the South Pole of the human condition; the emotions fall like iron filings within its field.
    A mind cannot teach itself not to think, but feelings fall into destined patterns.
    He was her theater…
    He was the poles of the world.
    He was all actions.
    He was not the imitation of actions, but the actions themselves.
    She knew he was a very capable man named Charles Render.
    She felt he was the Shaper.
    A mind may hold many things.
    But he was more than any one thing:
    He was every.
    … She felt it.
    When she stood to leave, her heels made echoes across the emptied dark.
    As she moved up the aisle, the sounds returned to her and returned to her.
    She was walking through an emptied theater, away from an emptied stage. She was alone.
    At the head of the aisle, she stopped.
    Like distant laughter, ended by a sudden slap, there was silence.
    She was neither audience nor player now. She was alone in a dark theater.
    She had cut a throat and saved a life.
    She had listened tonight, felt tonight, applauded tonight.
    Now, again, it was all gone away, and she was alone in a dark theater.
    She was afraid.
    The man continued to walk along the highway until he reached a certain tree. He stood, hands in his pockets, and stared at it for a long while. Then he turned and headed back in the direction from which he had come. Tomorrow was another day.
    “Oh, sorrow-crowned love of my life, why hast thou forsaken me? Am I not fair? I have loved thee long, and all the places of silence know my wailings. I have loved thee beyond myself, and I suffer for it. I have loved thee beyond life with all its sweetness, and the sweetnesses have turned to cloves and to almonds. I am ready to leave this my life for thee. Why shouldst thou depart in the greatwinged, manylegged ships over the sea, bearing with thee thy Lares and Penates, and I here alone? I shall make me a fire, to burn. I shall make me a fire—a conflagration to incinerate time and to burn away the spaces that separate us. I would be with thee always. I shall not go gently and silent into that holocaust, but wailing. I am no ordinary maiden, to pine away my life and to die, dark-eyed and sallow. For I am of the blood of the Princes of the Earth, and my arm is as the arm of a man’s in the battle. My upraised sword smites the helm of my foe and he falls down before it. I have never been subdued, my lord. But my eyes are sick of weeping, and my tongue of crying out. To make me to see thee, and then to never see thee again is a crime beyond expiation. I cannot forgive my love, nor thee. There was a time when I laughed at the songs of love and the plaints of the maidens by the riverside. Now is my laughter drawn, as an arrow from a wound, and I am myself without thee and alone. Forgive me not, love, for having loved thee. I want to fuel a fire with memory and my hopes. I want to set to burning my already burning thoughts of thee, to lay thee like a poem upon a campfire, to burn thy rhythmic utterance to ash. I loved