“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 Sound of Summer Running
Late that night, going home from the show with his mother and father and his brother Tom, Douglas saw the tennis shoes in the bright store window. He glanced quickly away, but his ankles were seized, his feet suspended, then rushed. The earth spun; the shop awnings slammed their canvas wings overhead with the thrust of his body running. His mother and father and brother walked quietly on both sides of him. Douglas walked backward, watching the tennis shoes in the midnight window left behind.
“It was a nice movie,” said Mother.
Douglas murmured, “It was. . . .”
It was June and long past time for buying the special shoes that were quiet as a summer rain falling on the walks. June and the earth full of raw power and everything everywhere in motion. The grass was still pouring in from the country, surrounding the sidewalks, stranding the houses. Any moment the town would capsize, go down and leave not a stir in the clover and weeds. And here Douglas stood, trapped on the dead cement and the red-brick streets, hardly able to move.
“Dad!” He blurted it out. “Back there in that window, those Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes . . .”
His father didn’t even turn. “Suppose you tell me why you need a new pair of sneakers. Can you do that?”
“Well . . .”
It was because they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass. They felt like it feels sticking your feet out of the hot covers in wintertime to let the cold wind from the open window blow on them suddenly and you let them stay out a long time until you pull them back in under the covers again to feel them, like packed snow. The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below, half an inch farther downstream, with refraction, than the real part of you above water.
“Dad,” said Douglas, “it’s hard to explain.”
Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.
Douglas tried to get all this in words.
“Yes,” said Father, “but what’s wrong with last year’s sneakers? Why can’t you dig them out of the closet?”
Well, he felt sorry for boys who lived in California where they wore tennis shoes all year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet, peel off the iron leather shoes all full of snow and rain and run barefoot for a day and then lace on the first new tennis shoes of the season, which was better than barefoot. The magic was always in the new pair of shoes. The magic might die by the first of September, but now in late June there was still plenty of magic, and shoes like these could jump you over trees and rivers and houses. And if you wanted, they could jump you over fences and sidewalks and dogs.
“Don’t you see?” said Douglas. “I just can’t use last year’s pair.”
For last year’s pair were dead inside. They had been fine when he started them out, last year. But by the end of summer, every year, you always found out, you always knew, you couldn’t really jump over rivers and trees and houses in them, and they were dead. But this was a new year, and he felt that this time, with this new pair of shoes, he could do anything, anything at all.
They walked up on the steps to their house. “Save your money,” said Dad. “In five or six weeks—”
“Summer’ll be over!”
Lights out, with Tom asleep, Douglas lay watching his feet, far away down there at the end of the bed in the moonlight, free of the heavy iron shoes, the big chunks of winter fallen away from them.
“Reasons. I’ve got to think of reasons for the shoes.”
Well, as anyone
