That decided, Terrance chose to walk home. The cool of the night was intensifying into a dry, pitiless cold, but he had always liked the cold. Winter was coming, and winter is the dry season of clarity. He had always done his best work in the winter. Particularly his work on Milton, which had revolutionized the perception of the poet. Not a Calvinistic prophet seeking to justify the ways of God to man, but - well, basically a sex maniac.
         Woman obsessed the mind of Milton. Her naked shame, her sinful blame: these images were with him from the beginning. Later, when he sat down to justify the ways of God to man, the end result was more a justification of the ways of man to woman.
         For woman was sinful from the start.
         It was woman who worshipped devils, demons, foul spirits, things bisexual in their nature. Bestial gods, brutish forms, foul idols. It was woman who worshipped those alien others, those black stalkers of darkness, heavy with alluring gold - demons, polymorphously perverse, able to change themselves, shape themselves, make themselves what they will.
         How does it go? I can't remember. Once I could remember but now I can't. It must have been that hamburger. In an entire lifetime, just one bite of cannibal cow. But one bite is all it takes. Baudelaire had syphilis, we have BSE. Just one bite, and all else follows. The original sin. Milton's mind, obsessed with sin. The sinful spirits. If I can't remember, I can still approximate:-

For spirits when they please
Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure,
Not chained with manacles of joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittleness of bones,
But, airy in what shape they choose,
Dilating in the cumbrous flesh they bower
And execute their airiness of purpose.

        Terrance thought about it all the way home. Then, seeking to purge Milton from his mind, he turned on the TV. Only to find Gavin there again, on the Pandora Program, still counterpunching.
         "Do you think this is an important issue?" said the interviewer.
         "Emphatically," said Gavin. "We can say goodbye to the past if the vampires are going to come creaking out of their coffins, courtesy of the Cannibal Scavenger Corporation or whatever."
         Gavin's strategy remained unchanged. Play the vampire angle. Fill the public's mind with images of dead bodies, rotting flesh, wet stench, corruption, decay. Make sure that, if the libel case went to trial, the jury would be on their side.
         For the uninitiated, the Pandora Program reviewed the facts. The Hallelujah Arts Resurrection Corporation broke into Milton's grave and took his bones. (Actually, they had wanted Shakespeare, but that had proved too controversial, partly because of the admonitory curse on the gravestone.) From the bones, they brewed up the necessary DNA then fabricated a body.
         So far, so good. Basic science. A cloning operation, pure and simple. However, a clone is only a body-copy. A brain which is merely a copy of Milton's brain is not Milton. If you make a bunch of different Miltons then disperse them round the world to be raised in India, Iran, California, Northern Ireland and North Korea, then you may quite possibly get a devout Hindu, a scholarly Ayatollah, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, a triggerman for the IRA and the Stalinist successor of Kim Jong Il.
         Environment influences - if you're born in Beijing, you won't grow up speaking Welsh, and if you're born in Wales then you'll probably reach adolescence without learning how to use chopsticks. And there is no way you can get the author of "Paradise Lost" if you take away the shaping influences: the Calvinist tradition of Puritan England, the laborious education in Greek and Hebrew and Latin, the stresses of a nation torn apart by civil war, the psychological catastrophe of the dysfunctional marriage, and then the long years of blindness in which the grown man was reliant upon the subservient daughters whom he tyrannized.
         And so the Hallelujah Arts Resurrection Corporation programmed the brain.
         Limbic Programming - that was the name for it. A kind of brainwashing, in the view of its detractors. Only there was nothing to wash away - you were starting with a tabula rasa. While the body was being grown to adulthood in its forcing tank - a process which took seven long years - the neutral stimulation technologies patented by the Hallelujah Arts Resurrection Corporation shaped the wet raw flesh to the assumed form of the Mind of Milton.
         When finally released from its tank, the artificially aged body - chronologically 60 years old - thought itself to be Milton. The deathbed Milton, miraculously resurrected to enjoy a further ten, twenty, maybe thirty years of life.
         "But it's a fraud," said Gavin. "There isn't enough known about Milton. Or about the human brain. If it's really Milton, why doesn't it write poetry? Two years out of the tank, and not a single line of poetry."
         Direct cut to John Milton himself. At a pub. Playing darts. Drunk. A tankard of beer - some props department must have supplied that tankard - at his side. Lugubriously drunk, his bright purple FREE THE SPHINX T-shirt riding up to reveal the pale whale of his beer belly.
         "Are you real?" said the interviewer.
         "I reckon so," said John.
         "But - are you the real Milton?"
         "That's the name on my driver's license. Got it last week."
         "So, if you're the real Milton, why don't you write poetry?"
         "These days I'm a performance poet. Stand back! Give the bard room!"
         And, given room, Milton launched himself into his performance poetry.

I like cow and I'll eat it
Till my nose drips out my fingers.
I'm a man of the land, it's okay by me,
Pass me the sky, I'm ready to fly,
Let's play the hip-hop, I'm ready to jazz,
And - oh, by the way, Coke is A-okay.

The love-heat of the roaring kine, which,
Pattied into hamburgers, fed and soon infected
All of Zion's daughters with equal heat.
And, like the amorous Sphinx which chose the whale,
They fed their wanton passions in the sacred porch
Where Ezekiel saw them, when, by the vision led,
His eye surveyed the dark idolatries
Of the alienated kingdom of the cow.

        The next day, Terrance felt hungover, although he had not touched a drop of alcohol for months. He spent the day preparing what he would say on the Port River Arts Show. And, when he went live that evening, Michael Cologne let him say it.
         Michael listened calmly, respectfully. Occasionally asking an urbane, cultured question to clarify a point for a non-specialist audience. Occasionally sitting back to sip at his liquid morphine. (As all the world knew, the cancer was far advanced, and Michael had, at best, only two or three more shows left in him).
         For Michael Cologne and for the world, Terrence Azlenabek outlined his reading of Milton's great work, "Paradise Lost". Art as sex war. For the twelve books of the great poem, Milton struggles with lustful, rebellious women. Subduing them, at last. In the twelfth and final book, we find the angel Michael -
         "Let's be sure to keep our Michaels straight," said Michael Cologne, with an urbane chuckle.
         - the angel, masculine by name regardless of whatever sex might be bestowed upon him by theology, in discourse with Adam. The male angel and the first man: they meet in grave debate upon a hill, the man receiving knowledge from the angel.
         Once masculine intelligence has been informed, the pair descend to the place where sinful woman sleeps - in Milton's words, "with gentle dreams composed to quietness of mind and submission." The first woman, Eve, admits her sinfulness, her blame; she yields to the rule of man.
         "The poem begins its arc with a parade of women lustful, active, self-willed, given to the subversion of the hearts of men," said Terrance. "It ends with the woman, the first of the female flesh, calmed, made passive, with all her spirits composed to meek submission."
         "But does any of this make Milton a sex maniac?" said Michael.
         "That term is one from the tabloids, contrived by them and never used by me," said Terrance. "It means that Milton was certainly always thinking about sex. Given that his long poem took a considerable time to write, I don't think it is going too far to call him sex-obsessed."
         "But Milton says his poem is about God and providence."
         "Ever since Freud, it has been impossible to take any individual's account of their motives at face value," said Terrance. "Arguably, this poem functions as an instrumentality of power in the mundane realm in which a man forges machines of manipulation to dominate and subdue a woman."
         "But Milton - "
         "Didn't possess self-awareness. He didn't realize - couldn't realize - that he'd been writing a poem about his own sex difficulties."
         Hot. The heat of intellectual excitement. You may say you did this, but I know what you really did. Heat of battle amplified by the heat of television lights. Sweat forming on his forehand.
         "So, in your reading," said Michael Cologne, "the supposedly theological poem becomes a sexual instrument, a wish-fulfillment fantasy, if you like, in which a rebellious reality is absorbed and transfigured by the shaping imagination."
         "Exactly," said Terrance.
         Very bright, this Mr Cologne. Let's give him an A, maybe even an A-plus. No, not an A-plus - to get that A-plus you should either extend or oppose the argument, not simply understand it. But. Even so. How gratifying that at least one of the eaters-of-cow understands. Here, under the hot lights, in the intolerable hum of silence, at least one mind that understands. One cool spot in hell.
         "But," said Michael Cologne, "suppose, for the sake of argument, that all this is true. How does it bear on the life of the present-day John Milton? I mean - you do say that he is not the real Milton at all."
         "He is not and cannot be the real Milton," said Terrance, fighting to stay cool as the waves of heat swamped over him. "The technology is a guesswork reconstruction, as the company admits. In point of fact, we cannot know of a certainty how Milton pronounced his vowels. Far less what he did in bed. But, if the company has claimed to have fabricated the complete man, they must have fantasized a sex life for him."
         And what would that have been like? To have had a sex life? To have claimed one of those breathlessly attentive maidens who blushed when you touched the ever-so-intimate computer printouts which formed the earthly embodiment of their conceptual processes? To have made the slight aperture of that pouting mouth open a little wider? To have touched the wetness? Hot engulfments of a cow, there were viruses, I never touched, you can't condemn me, you can't do this to me. God.
         "So he's not Milton," said Michael. "Yet you make statements about him which would seem, on the face of it, to be libellous."
         "Libellous and slanderous," acknowledged Terrance, maintaining the cold needle of his intelligence amidst the buzzing lights, the blistering hot silence. "Libel being the embodiment of those ideas in print, slander their vocal expression."
         "Are you admitting libeling him, then?"
         "All I am saying," said Terrance, wishing he could say more, wishing he could breathe out the swelling darkness, "all I am saying, and all I have said, is that, to the extent to which the living, breathing, dart-playing John Milton is the historical poet, to that extent and to that extent only do my remarks about him hold true."
         "Including the ones about child molestation?"
         "I spoke of an undeniable attraction to his daughters," said Terrance, speaking with the exaggerated carefulness of a man who knows he is hopelessly drunk. "I was thinking of his daughters as sexually mature women. As they were when they cared for the blind Milton. Not immature children. The point is, the Ghoulish Arts Corporation - "
         "The Hallelujah Arts Resurrection Corporation?"
         "Yes, that," said Terrance. Drunk on the heat. Drunk, with the singing virus swelling triumphantly inside him. Bovine spongiform encephalitis. "They can't have their cake and eat it. That's the point. To the extent to which the present Milton is the real Milton, he's a sex maniac. As the tabloids have it."
         "He is a sex maniac, then."
         "No," said Terrance. "It is a sex maniac."
         Watching this live on TV - the lines to the studio were jammed, and his repeated attempts to get through on the phone had resulted in total failure - Gavin Maps cringed. You don't refer to a human being as "it". Not live on TV. Your jury - and, Terry old son, I think this one really is going to go to trial - won't forgive you. Not for that. You can't play the remote Apollonian intellectual in this Dionysian age. We're into the warm fuzzies, Terry, we don't relate to human icebergs like you.
         "Terrance," said Michael Cologne, "you've been very frank with us tonight, and I only wish we had more time to explore the intricacies of this situation. I just have one last question for you. Aren't you - well, at least a little wary of the consequences of speaking as freely as you have?"
         "No," said Terrance.
         Hot from the lights. The darkness bulging into brightness then fading again. Truth. The truth will out.
         "No? Not at all?"
         "Don't put your umbrella in a woman," said Terrance. "You'll get syphilis."
         "I do beg your pardon?"
         "I ate a hamburger," explained Terrance. "My mother died. She was tottering around for five years. Babbling. Her brain was a sponge, do you realize that? Wet, like a cheese, torn apart, as if people had been copulating inside it. I ate the hamburger, nobody warned me."
         It was swelling inside him, the confession, and now he confessed. He had eaten, he had eaten, he had done it. All his denials, all his acts of prudence and caution, all his shunning and abstaining, it had done him no good at all, in the end.
         "This was back before the warnings, back before we knew," said Terrance. "I was a young man then, nobody knew. Or, rather - some of them knew, but they didn't tell us, oh no, we were cannon fodder, contamination for profit, can't run the farm without bodies for the silage bins."

        After that, it was all a bit blurred, until Terrance was out in the night, walking. The car caught up with him by the riverside. Stopped.
         "Get in," said Gavin Maps.
         And in they got.
         "Drive me home," said Terrance.
         "I don't think you're in any fit state to be going home," said Gavin. "I've arranged for someone to have a look at you, and that's where we're going. Right now."
         But the hospital couldn't hold him. And, on the way back home, Terrance bought a gun. (He had read in the press that you could get one on any street corner, but actually it wasn't that easy - it took two hours, three whiskeys and a black eye to get what he wanted. But he got it all right.)
         So. Out like Hemingway. Gun to the head and -

        "How do you feel, Terry?"
         The words swam down to him from the hot whiteness of nothing. He was in pain, but the edges of the pain were blurred. His eyes closed, and there was darkness.
         "How do you feel?"
         In the beginning there was the Word.
         "How do you feel, Terry?"
         A woman's voice, this time. And, provoked by the voice, he found he could speak.
         "Did you say something, Terry?"
         Apparently he had been mistaken. He thought he had spoken, but he had not.