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 mnachnne. 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 sumi goes down behind the buildings. Dusk gathers. The city remains unilluniinated. 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 hips 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 hong 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 time 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 not something we cannot understand with words and equations. Prove to me likewise that I have no right to seek for it.
“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 I-Icr voice? “Therefore he claims SUM is cruel.”