He was still upset by the revelation that if he abandoned the faux marriage Lilian and probably dozens of other people would be killed. Worse, the fact that he was upset reinforced the depressing fact that he now accepted that the Nisirtu did, in fact, control the world and were bent on destroying it. He decided that research would be his escape. He was grateful that he could rely on the unchanging, emotionless tablets to be there for him when he needed a distraction. Not that the tablets were exactly his friends. Indeed, they seemed to delight in vexing him, at keeping their secrets secret while teasing him with insights that flashed into and out of mind too rapidly to register. Sometimes the etchings would fill his head with images and thoughts so utterly alien that he could not have conceived them on his own. Images of places and beings and events that ranged from heavenly to hellish. He knew of drugs that could allegedly cause such thoughts, drugs he had taken himself when he first got back from the war.
