I HAD NOT CORRELATED THESE DATA WITH THE FACTS CONCERNING YOU. THIS INTRODUCES A NEW AND INDETERMINATE QUANTITY INTO THE COMPUTATIONS.
The nirvana which has come upon me (yes, I found that word among the old books, and how portentous it is) is not passiveness, it is a tide more full and strong than that which bore me down to the Dark Queen those ages past in wildcountry. I say, as coolly as may be, “An interesting coincidence. If it is a coincidence.” Surely sonic receptors are emplaced hereabouts.
EITHER THAT, OR A CERTAIN NECESSARY CONSEQUENCE OF THE LOGIC OF EVENTS.
The vision dawning within me is so blinding bright that I cannot refrain from answering, “Or a destiny, SUM?”
MEANINGLESS. MEANINGLESS. MEANINGLESS.
“Now why did You repeat Yourself in that way? Once would have sufficed. Thrice, though, makes an incantation. Are You by any chance hoping Your words will make me stop existing?”
I DO NOT HOPE. YOU ARE AN EXPERIMENT. IF I COMPUTE A SIGNIFICANT PROBABILITY OF YOUR CAUSING SERIOUS DISTURBANCE, I WILL HAVE YOU TERMINATED.
I smile. “SUM,” I say, “I am going to terminate You.” I lean over and switch off the screen. I walk out into the evening.
Not everything is clear to me yet, that I must say and do. But enough is that I can start preaching at once to those who have been waiting for me. As I talk, others come down the street, and hear, and stay to listen. Soon they number in the hundreds.
I have no immense new truth to offer them: nothing that I have not said before, although piecemeal and unsystematically; nothing they have not felt themselves, in the innermost darkness of their beings. Today, however, knowing who I am and therefore why I am, I can put these things in words. Speaking quietly, now and then drawing on some forgotten song to show my meaning, I tell them how sick and starved their lives are; how they have made themselves slaves; how the enslavement is not even to a conscious mind, but to an insensate inanimate thing which their own ancestors began; how that thing is not the centrum of existence, but a few scraps of metal and bleats of energy, a few sad stupid patterns, adrift in unbounded space-time. Put not your faith in SUM, I tell them. SUM is doomed, even as you and I. Seek out mystery; what else is the whole cosmos but mystery? Live bravely, die and be done, and you will be more than any machnne. You may perhaps be God.
They grow tumultuous. They shout replies, some of which are animal howls. A few are for me, most are opposed. That doesn’t matter. I have reached into them, my music is being played on their nervestrings, and this is my entire purpose.
The sun goes down behind the buildings. Dusk gathers. The city remains un-illuminated. I soon realize why. She is coming, the Dark Queen Whom they wanted me to debate with. From afar we hear Her chariot thunder. Folk wail in terror. They are not wont to do that either. They used to disguise their feelings from Her and themselves by receiving Her with grave sparse ceremony. Now they would flee if they dared. I have lifted the masks.
The chariot halts in the street. She dismounts, tall and shadowy cowled. The people make way before Her like water before a shark. She climbs the stairs to face me. I see for the least instant that Her lips are not quite firm amid Her eyes abrim with tears. She whispers, too low for anyone else to hear, “Oh, Harper, I’m sorry.”
“Come join me,” I invite. “Help me set the world free.”
“No. I cannot. I have been too long with It.” She straightens. Imperium descends upon Her. Her voice rises for everyone to hear. The little television robots flit chose, bat shapes in the twilight, that the whole planet may witness my defeat. “What is this freedom you rant about?” She demands.
“To feel,” I say. “To venture. To wonder. To become men again.”
“To become beasts, you mean. Would you demolish the machines that keep us alive?”
“Yes. We must. Once they were good and useful, but we let them grow upon us like a cancer, and now nothing but destruction and a new beginning can save us.
“Have you considered the chaos?”
“Yes. It too is necessary. We will not be men without the freedom to know suffering. In it is also enlightenment. Through it we travel beyond ourselves, beyond earth and stars, space and time, to Mystery.”
“So you maintain that there is some undefined ultimate vagueness behind the measurable universe?” She smiles into the bat eyes. We have each been taught, as children, to laugh on hearing sarcasms of this kind. “Please offer me a little proof.”
“No,” I say. “Prove to me instead, beyond any doubt, that there is
“The burden of proof is on You Two, so often have You lied to us. In the name of rationality, You resurrected myth. The better to control us! In the name of liberation, You chained our inner lives and castrated our souls. In the name of service, You bound and blinkered us. In the name of achievement, You held us to a narrower round than any swine in its pen. In the name of beneficence, You created pain, and horror, and darkness beyond darkness.” I turn to the people. “I went there. I descended into the cellars. I know!”
“He found that SUM would not pander to his special wishes, at the expense of everyone else,” cries the Dark Queen. Do I hear shrillness in Her voice? “Therefore he claims SUM is cruel.”
“I saw my dead,” I tell them. “She will not rise again. Nor yours, nor you. Not ever. SUM will not, cannot raise us. In Its house is death indeed. We must seek life and rebirth elsewhere, among the mysteries.”
She laughs aloud and points to my soul bracelet, glimmering faintly in the gray-blue thickening twilight. Need She say anything?
“Will someone give me a knife and an ax?” I ask.
The crowd stirs and mumbles. I smell their fear. Streetlamps go on, as if they could scatter more than this corner of the night which is roiling upon us. I fold my arms and wait. The Dark Queen says something to me. I ignore Her.
The tools pass from hand to hand. He who brings them up the stairs conies like a flame. He kneels at my feet and lifts what I have desired. The tools are good ones, a broad-bladed hunting knife and a long double-bitted ax.
Before the world, I take the knife in my right hand and slash beneath the bracelet on my left wrist. The connections to my inner body are cut. Blood flows, impossibly brilliant under the lamps. It does not hurt; I am too exalted.
The Dark Queen shrieks. “You meant it! Harper, Harper!”
“There is no life in SUM,” I say. I pull my hand through the circle and cast the bracelet down so it rings.
A voice of brass: “
The monitors who have stood on the fringes of the crowd try to push through. They are resisted. Those who seek to help them encounter fists and fingernails.
I take the ax and smash downward. The bracelet crumples. The organic material within, starved of my secretions, exposed to the night air, withers.
I raise the tools, ax in right hand, knife in bleeding heft. “I seek eternity where it is to be found,” I call. “Who goes with me?”
A score or better break loose from the riot, which is already calling forth weapons and claiming lives. They surround me with their bodies. Their eyes are the eyes of prophets. We make haste to seek a hiding place, for one military robot has appeared and others will not be long in coming. The tall engine strides to stand guard over Our Lady, and this is my last glimpse of Her.
My followers do not reproach me for having cost them all they were. They are mine. In me is the godhead which can do no wrong.
And the war is open, between me and SUM. My friends are few, my enemies many and mighty. I go about the world as a fugitive. But always I sing. And always I find someone who will listen, will join us, embracing pain and death like a lover.
With the Knife and the Ax I take their souls. Afterward we hold for them the ritual of rebirth. Some go thence to become outlaw missionaries; most put on facsimile bracelets and return home, to whisper my word. It makes little difference to me. I have no haste, who own eternity.
For my word is of what lies beyond time. My enemies say I call forth ancient bestialities and lunacies; that I would bring civilization down in ruin; that it matters not a madman’s giggle to me whether war, famine, amid pestilence will again scour the earth. With these accusations I am satisfied. The language of them shows me that
