Fear, perhaps, of what I have sung and what I might speak?
At last She says—I can scarcely hear through the gusts and creakings in the trees—”Give me the Ring, then.”
The dwarf robot which stamids by Her throne when She sits among men appears beside Her and extends the massive dull-silver circle to me. I place my left arm within, so that my soul is enclosed. The tablet on the upper surface of the Ring, which looks so much like a jewel, slants away from me; I cannot read what flashes onto the bezel. But the faint glow picks Her features out of murk as She bends to look.
Of course, I tell myself, the actual soul is not scanned. That would take too long. Probably the bracelet which contains the soul has an identification code built in. The Ring sends this to an appropriate part of SUM, Which instantly sends back what is recorded under that code. I hope there is nothing more to it. SUM has not seen fit to tell us.
“\Vhat do you call yourself at the moment?” She asks.
A current of bitterness crosses my tide. “Lady of Ours, why should You care? Is not my real name the number I got when I was allowed to be born?”
Calm descends omice more upon I-Icr. “If I am to evaluate properly what you say, I must know more about you than these few official data. Nanie indicates mood.”
I too feel unshaken again, niy tide running so strong amid smooth that I might not know I was moving did I not see time recede behind me. “Lady of Ours, I cannot give You a fair answer. In this past year I have not troubled with names, or with much of anything else. But some people who knew me from earlier days call me Harper.”
“What do you do besides make that sinister music?”
“These days, nothing, Lady of Ours. I’ve money to live out my life, if I eat sparingly and keep no home. Often I am fed and housed for the sake of my songs.
“What you sang is unlike anything I have heard since—” Anew, briefly, that robot serenity is shaken. “Since before the world was stabilized. You should not wake dead symbols, Harper. They walk through men’s dreams.”
“Is thmat bad?”
“Yes. The dreams become nightmares. Remember: Mankind, every man who ever lived, was insane before SUM brought order, reason, and peace.”
“Well, then,” I say, “I will cease and desist if I may have my own dead wakened for me.”
She stiffemis. The tablet goes out. I withdraw my arm and the Ring is stored
away by Her servant. So again She is faceless, beneath flickering stars, here at the bottom of this shadowed valley. Her voice falls cold as the air: “No one can be brought back to life before Resurrection Time is ripe.”
I do not say, “What about You?” for that would be vicious. What did She think, how did She weep, when SUM chose Her of all the young on earth? What does She endure in Her centuries? I dare not imagine.
Instead, I smite my harp and sing, quietly this time:
“Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew. In quiet she reposes:
Ah! Would that I did too.”
The Dark Queen cries, “What are you doing? Are you really insane?” I go straight to the last stanza.
“Her cabin’d, ample Spirit
It flutter’d and fail’d for breath.
To-night it doth inherit
The vasty hall of Death.”
I know why my songs strike so hard: because they hear dreads aiid passions that no one is used to—that most of us hardly kmiow could exist—in SUM’s ordered universe. But I had not the courage to hope She would be as torn by them as I see. Has She not lived with more darkness and terror thaii the ancients themselves could conceive? She calls, “Who has died?”
“She had many names, Lady of Ours,” I say. “None was beautiful enough. I can tell You her number, though.”
“Your daughter? I – . . sonietimes I am asked if a dead child cannot be brought back. Not often, anymore, when they go so soon to the crèche. But sometimes. I tell the mother she may have a new one; but if ever We started re-creating dead infants, at what age level could We stop?”