“But this,” cried Kront. “How did it evolve to this?”
“I went looking. I scoured the world. If I found one precious blade of grass, I reasoned, then perhaps I can find another thing, a lizard that had escaped, or a snake, or some such thing. I was more than lucky. I found a small monkey. From there to this is another thousand years and more. Artificial breeding, insemination, a study of genes and cells, well, it is here now, and it is good.”
“It is forbidden!”
“Yes. Damnably forbidden. Look, Ome, do you know why flesh was eradicated from the Earth?”
Ome deliberated. “Because it threatened Obot Rule.”
“How did it threaten it?”
“With the Rust.”
“With more than the Rust,” replied Ultar, quietly. “Flesh threatened us with another way of life and thought. It threatened us with delightful imperfection, unpredictability, art, and literature, and we slaughtered flesh and made it blasphemy and forbidden to see flesh or speak of it.”
“Liar!”
“Am I?” demanded Ultar. “Who owned the world before us?”
“We’ve always owned it. Always.”
“What about flesh? Explain it?”
“It was an experiment that got away from us for a time. Some insane Obot scientist created monster flesh and it bred, and it was the servant of the Obots, and it overthrew Obot Rule for a time. Finally, the Obots had to destroy it.”
“Religious dogmatism!” replied Ultar. “You’ve been taught to think that. But, know the truth. There must’ve been a Beginning, do you agree?”
“Yes. There was a Beginning. The Book of Metal says that all the Universe was turned out on one Lathe of one Huge Machine. And we the small Obots of that Lathe and that Machine.”
“There had to be a first Obot, did there not?”
“Yes.”
“And who built him?”
“Another machine.”
“But before that, at the very beginning? Who built the machine that built the Obot? I’ll tell you. Flesh. Flesh built the first machine. Flesh once ruled this continent and all continents. Because flesh grows. Machines do not grow. They are made piece by piece—they are built. It took a growing creature to build them!”
Ome went wild. “No, no. That is a terrible thought!”
“Listen,” said Ultar. “We could not stand man and his imperfect ways. We thought him silly and ridiculous with his art and music. He could die. We could not. So we destroyed him because he was in the way, he cluttered up our perfect universe.
And then, we had to lie to ourselves. In our own way we are colossally vain. Just as man fashioned God in his own image, so we had to fashion our God in our image. We couldn’t stand the thought of Man being our God, so we eradicated every vestige of protoplasm on Earth, and forbade speaking of it. We were Machines, made by Machines, that was the All, and the Truth.”
He was finished with his speaking. The others looked at him, and at last Kront said, “Why did you do it? Why have you made this thing of flesh and imperfection?”
“Why?” Ultar turned to the box. “Look at him, this creature, this man, so small, so vulnerable. His life is worth something because of his very vulnerability. Out of his fear and terror and uncertainty he once created great art, great music and great literature. Do we? We do not.
“How can a civilization create when it lives forever and nothing is of value? Things only take value from their evanescence, things are only appreciated because they vanish. How beautiful a summer day is that is only one of a kind; you all have seen such days—one of the few things of beauty that we know, the weather, which changes. We do not change, therefore there is no beauty and no art.
“See him here, in his box, dreaming, about to wake. Little frightened man, on the edge of death, but writing fine books to live long after. I’ve seen those books in forbidden libraries, full of love and tenderness and terror.
And what was his music but a proclamation against the uncertainty of living and the sureness of death and dissolution? What perfect things came from such imperfect creatures. They were sublimely delicate and sublimely wrong, and they waged wars and did many bad things, which we, in our perfectness cannot understand.
“We cannot understand death, really, for it is so rare among us, and has no value. But this man knows death and beauty and for that reason I created him so that some of the beauty and uncertainty would return to the world. Only then could life have any meaning to me, little as I can appreciate it with my limited faculties.
“He had the pleasure of pain, yes, even pain a pleasure, in its own way, for it is feeling and being alive; he lived, and he ate, which we do not do, and knew the goodness of love and raising others like himself and he knew a thing called sleep, and in those sleepings he dreamed, a thing we never do, and here he is now, dreaming fine things we could never hope to know or understand. And you are here, afraid of him and afraid of beauty and meaning and value.”
The others stiffened. Kront turned to them and said, “Listen, all of you. You will say nothing of what you’ve seen today, you will tell no one. Understand?”
The others swayed and moaned in a dazed, wavering anger.
The sleeper in the long oblong box stirred, fitfully, the eyelids quivered, the lips moved. The man was waking.
“The Rust!” screamed Kront, rushing forward. “Seize Ultar! The Rust! The Rust!”
The End
