Asir frowned. The years were not longer numbered, but only named in honor of the Chief Commoners who ruled the villages. “How long until the year 6,000?” he asked.
Big Joe clucked like an adding machine. “Twelve Marsyears, technologist.”
Asir stared at the complicated machinery. Could they learn to operate it in twelve years? It seemed impossible.
“How can we begin to learn?” be asked the robot.
Asir frowned and walked to the far end of the hail where another door opened into—
Thunderstruck, he leaped back from the entrance and swayed heavily against an instrument panel. The panel lit up and a polite recorded voice began reading something about “President Snell’s role in the Eighth World War.” He lurched away from the panel and stumbled back toward Mara who sat glumly on the foundation slap of a weighty machine.
“What are you laughing about?” she muttered.
“We’re still in the first grade!” he groaned, envisioning a sequence of rooms. “We’ll have to learn the magic of the ancients before we pass to the next.”
“The ancients weren’t so great,” she grumbled. “Look at the mural on the wall.”
Asir looked, and saw only a strange design of circles about a bright splash of yellow that might have been the sun. “What about it?” he asked.
“My father taught me about the planets,” she said. “That is supposed to be the way they go around the sun.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“One planet too many,” she said. “Everyone knows that there is only an asteroid belt between Mars and Venus. The picture shows a planet there.”
Asir shrugged indifferently, being interested only in the machinery. “Can’t you allow them one small mistake?”
“I suppose.” She paused, gazing miserably in the direction in which her father had gone. “What do we do now?”
Asir considered it for a long time. Then he spoke to Big Joe. “You will come with us to the village.”
The machine was silent for a moment, then: “
Asir failed to understand. He repeated his request. The robot turned slowly and stepped through the doorway. He waited.
Asir grinned. “Let’s go back up,” he said to the girl.
She arose eagerly. They crossed the anteroom to the corridor and began the long climb toward the surface, with Big Joe lumbering along behind.
“What about your banishment, Asir?” she asked gravely.
“Wait and see.” He envisioned the pandemonium that would reign when girl, man, and robot marched through the village to the council house, and he chuckled. “I think that I shall be the next Chief Commoner,” he said. “And my councilmen will all be thieves.”
“Thieves!” she gasped. “Why?”
“Thieves who are not afraid to steal the knowledge of the gods—and become technologists, to kindle the Blaze of the Winds.”
“What is a ‘technologist’, Asir?” she asked worshipfully.
Asir glowered at himself for blundering with words he did not understand, but could not admit ignorance to Mara who clung tightly to his arm. “I think,” he said, “that a technologist is a thief who tells the gods what to do.”
“Kiss me, Technologist,” she told him in a small voice. Big Joe clanked to a stop to wait for them to move on. He waited a long time.
The Big Hunger
I AM BLIND, yet I know the road to the stars. Space is my harp, and I touch it lightly with fingers of steel. Space sings. Its music quivers in the flux patterns, comes creeping along the twitch of a positron stream, comes to whisper in glass ears. I hear. Alec! Though I am without eyes, I see the stars tangled in their field-webs, tangled into One. I am the spider who runs over the web. I am the spider who spins, spinning a space where no stars are.
And I am Harpist to a pale, proud Master.
He builds me, and feeds me the fuel I eat, and leads nee riding through the space I make, to the glare of another sun. And when he is done with me, I lie rusting in the rain. My metal rots with ages, and the sea comes washing over land to take me while I sleep. The Master forgets. The Master chips flint from a stone, leaving a stone-ax. He busies himself with drums and bloody altars; he dances with a writhing snake in his mouth, conjuring the rain.
Then—after a long time—he remembers. He builds an-other of me, and I am the same, for like the Soul of him who builds me, my principle lies beyond particular flesh. When my principle is clothed in steel, we go wandering again. I the minstrel, with Man the king.
Hear the song of his hunger, the song of his endless thirst.
There was a man named Abe Jolie, and he leaned against me idly with one hand in the gloom while he spoke quietly and laughed with a female of his species.
“It’s finished, Junebug. We got it made,” he said.
And the girl looked her green eyes over me while the crickets sang beyond the wall, and while the shuttling of their feet echoed faintly in the great hangar.
“Finished,” she murmured. “It’s your success, Abe.”
“Mine, and a lot of others. And the government’s money.”
She toyed with the lapel of his coveralls, grinned, and said, “Let’s steal it and run away.”
“Abe—”
“What?”
“Kiss me.”
He kissed her.
“When is that going to be illegal, too?” she whispered. He looked at her grimly, and she answered her own question.
“As soon as the eugenics laws are passed, Abe. Abe Jolie, who built the spacedrive, a genetic undesirable.”
“
They stood there breathing quietly, and there was hate in their throats.
“Well?”
He looked around again, and whispered, “Meet me here at eleven o’clock, Junebug.”
They parted to the sound of casual footsteps.
At eleven o’clock, a lion roared in the hangar. At eleven o’clock a steel juggernaut tore through the hangar wall and paused on a concrete ramp while bullets ricocheted off the hull. Then the first star-chariot burnt a verticle
