Dark Benediction

by Walter Michael Miller

  “Mara!” he moaned. “My daughter.”

  “Go back, Father,” she called.

  Dazed, the old man picked himself up weakly and staggered down the corridor toward the stairway. When he passed the place of the first warning voice, the robot moved again—arose slowly and turned toward Asir and Mara who backed quickly away, deeper into the room of strange machines. Big Joe came lumbering slowly after them.

  Asir looked around for a place to flee, but the monster stopped in the doorway. He spoke again, a mechanical drone like memorized ritual.

  Big Joe is charged with announcing his function for the intelligence of the technologists. His primary function is to prevent the entrance of possibly destructive organisms into the vaults containing the control equipment for the fusion reaction which must periodically renew atmospheric oxygen. His secondary function is to direct the technologists to records containing such information as they may need. His tertiary function is to carry out simple directions given by the technologists if such directions are possible to his limited design.

  Asir stared at the lumbering creature and realized for the first time that it was not alive, but only a machine built by the ancients to perform specific tasks. Despite the fresh redness about his hands and jaws, Big Joe was no more guilty of Slubil’s death than a grinding mill would be if the squat sadist had climbed into it while the Mars oxen were yoked to the crushing roller.

  Perhaps the ancients had been unnecessarily brutal in building such a guard—but at least they had built him to look like a destroyer, and to give ample warning to the intruder. Glancing around at the machinery, he vaguely understood the reason for Big Joe. Such metals as these would mean riches for swordmakers and smiths and plunderers of all kinds.

  Asir straightened his shoulders and addressed the machine.

  “Teach us how to kindle the Blaze of the Great Wind.”

  “Teaching is not within the designed functions of Big Joe. I am charged to say: the renewal reaction should not be begun before the Marsyear 6,000, as the builders reckoned time.”

  Asir frowned. The years were not longer numbered, but only named in honor of the Chief Commoners who ruled the villages. “How long until the year 6,000?” he asked.

  Big Joe clucked like an adding machine. “Twelve Marsyears, technologist.”

  Asir stared at the complicated machinery. Could they learn to operate it in twelve years? It seemed impossible.

  “How can we begin to learn?” be asked the robot.

  “This is an instruction room, where you may examine records. The control mechanisms are installed in the deepest vault.”

  Asir frowned and walked to the far end of the hail where another door opened into—another anteroom with another Big Joe! As he approached the second robot spoke:

  “If the intruder has not acquired the proper knowledge, Big Oswald will kill.”

  Thunderstruck, he leaped back from the entrance and swayed heavily against an instrument panel. The panel lit up and a polite recorded voice began reading something about “President Snell’s role in the Eighth World War.” He lurched away from the panel and stumbled back toward Mara who sat glumly on the foundation slap of a weighty machine.

  “What are you laughing about?” she muttered.

  “We’re still in the first grade!” he groaned, envisioning a sequence of rooms. “We’ll have to learn the magic of the ancients before we pass to the next.”

  “The ancients weren’t so great,” she grumbled. “Look at the mural on the wall.”

  Asir looked, and saw only a strange design of circles about a bright splash of yellow that might have been the sun. “What about it?” he asked.

  “My father taught me about the planets,” she said. “That is supposed to be the way they go around the sun.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “One planet too many,” she said. “Everyone knows that there is only an asteroid belt between Mars and Venus. The picture shows a planet there.”

  Asir shrugged indifferently, being interested only in the machinery. “Can’t you allow them one small mistake?”

  “I suppose.” She paused, gazing miserably in the direction in which her father had gone. “What do we do now?”

  Asir considered it for a long time. Then he spoke to Big Joe. “You will come with us to the village.”

  The machine was silent for a moment, then: “There is an apparent contradiction between primary and tertiary functions. Request priority decision by technologist.”

  Asir failed to understand. He repeated his request. The robot turned slowly and stepped through the doorway. He waited.

  Asir grinned. “Let’s go back up,” he said to the girl.

  She arose eagerly. They crossed the anteroom to the corridor and began the long climb toward the surface, with Big Joe lumbering along behind.

  “What about your banishment, Asir?” she asked gravely.

  “Wait and see.” He envisioned the pandemonium that would reign when girl, man, and robot marched through the village to the council house, and he chuckled. “I think that I shall be the next Chief Commoner,” he said. “And my councilmen will all be thieves.”

  “Thieves!” she gasped. “Why?”

  “Thieves who are not afraid to steal the knowledge of the gods—and become technologists, to kindle the Blaze of the Winds.”

  “What is a ‘technologist’, Asir?” she asked worshipfully.

  Asir glowered at himself for blundering with words he did not understand, but could not admit ignorance to Mara who clung tightly to his arm. “I think,” he said, “that a technologist is a thief who tells the gods what to do.”

  “Kiss me, Technologist,” she told him in a small voice. Big Joe clanked to a stop to wait for them to move on. He waited a long time.

  1965 (published in 1952 as It Takes a Thief)

  THE BIG HUNGER

  I am blind, yet I know the road to the stars. Space is my harp, and I touch it lightly with fingers of steel. Space sings. Its music quivers in the flux patterns, comes creeping along the twitch of a positron stream, comes to whisper in glass ears. I hear. Alec! Though I am without eyes, I see the stars tangled in their field-webs, tangled into One. I am the spider who runs over the web. I am the spider who spins, spinning a space where no stars are.

  And I am Harpist to a pale, proud Master.

  He builds me, and feeds me the fuel I eat, and leads me riding through the space I make, to the glare of another sun. And when he is done with me, I lie rusting in the rain. My metal rots with ages, and the sea comes washing over land to take me while I sleep. The Master forgets. The Master chips flint from a stone, leaving a stone-ax. He busies himself with drums and bloody altars; he dances with a writhing snake in his mouth, conjuring the rain.

  Then—after a long time—he remembers. He builds another of me, and I am the same, for like the Soul of him who builds me, my principle lies beyond particular flesh. When my principle is clothed in steel, we go wandering again. I the minstrel, with Man the king.

  Hear the song of his hunger, the song of his endless thirst.

  There was a man named Abe Jolie, and he leaned against me idly with one hand in the gloom while he spoke quietly and laughed with a female of his species.

  “It’s finished, Junebug. We got it made,” he said.

  And the girl looked her green eyes over me while the crickets sang beyond the wall, and while the shuttling of their feet echoed faintly in the great hangar.

  “Finished,” she murmured. “It’s your success, Abe.”

  “Mine, and a lot of others. And the government’s money.”

  She toyed with the lapel of his coveralls, grinned, and said, “Let’s steal it and run away.”

  “Ssshh!” He looked around nervously, but there were no guards in sight. “They can shoot you for less than that,” he warned. “The S.P. doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

  “Abe—”

  “What?”

  “Kiss me.”

>   He kissed her.

  “When is that going to be illegal, too?” she whispered. He looked at her grimly, and she answered her own question.

  “As soon as the eugenics laws are passed, Abe. Abe Jolie, who built the spacedrive, a genetic undesirable.”

  “Don’t!”

  They stood there breathing quietly, and there was hate in their throats.

  “Well?”

  He looked around again, and whispered, “Meet me here at eleven o’clock, Junebug.”

  They parted to the sound of casual footsteps.

  At eleven o’clock, a lion roared in the hangar. At eleven o’clock a steel juggernaut tore through the hangar wall and paused on a concrete ramp while bullets ricocheted off the hull. Then the first star-chariot burnt a verticle column of flame in the night. Thunder walked upward on fiery stilts, while men shouted angrily. When we were alone in the airless, star-stung, sun-torn blackness, I stroked the web of space, and listened to the muted notes. When the tune is memorized, I speak. I contradict. I refute the universe. We lived in a spaceless space beyond stars.

  The man and the woman had gone. But the plan remained on Earth. My principle lingered on the drawing boards, and in the dreams of men—men who said they were sick of wars and politics and the braying of collectivist jackasses. Others were sick of petty peace and cheapness and Independence Day speeches and incorporated jackasses who blubbered disgustingly about various freedoms.

  They wanted the one Big Freedom. They built me again, these pale, proud bipeds, these children of an Ape-Prince who walked like a god. They packed themselves in cylinders of steel and wandering, riding starward on a heart-tempest that had once sung them down from the trees to stalk the plains with club and torch. The pod of earth opened, scattered its seed spaceward. It was the time of the great bursting, the great birth-giving. Empires shivered in the storm.

  Sky-chariots flung themselves upward to vanish beyond the fringes of the atmosphere. Prairie schooners of space bore the restless, the contemptuous, the hungry and the proud. And I led them along the self-road that runs around space. The world seethed, and empires toppled, and new empires arose whose purpose it was to build the sky-chariots.

  Young men, young women, clamored at the gates of launching fields. Those who were chosen grinned expectantly at the stars. They climbed aboard in throngs and deserted Earth. They were hard laughers with red freckles and big fists. They wore slide rules at their belts like swords, and they spoke familiarly of Schwarschild Line-Elements and Riemann-Christofel tensors. Their women were restless talkers, big women, with flashing white teeth. They teased the men, and their hands were strong and brown.

  Poets came—and misfits, and saints, sinners, dirt-farmers. Engineers came and child-bearers, fighters, utopianists, and dreamers with the lights of God glowing in their starward eyes.

  “Why were we taught to pray with downcast eyes?” they asked. “When you pray, look starward, look to the God at the north end of the Universe.”

  Man was a starward wind, a mustard seed, a wisp of Brahma’s breath breathed across space.

  They found two corpses in an orbit about Arcturus. The corpses were frozen and the ice was slowly sublimating into space-vapor. One of them had an Engineering Union card in his pocket. It gave his name as Abe Jolie. The other was a girl. And, because the corpse had given them the blueprints that led to space, they hauled him aboard with the girl. Somebody sang the “Kyrie” and somebody said, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Then they cancelled out the orbital velocity and let the corpses go toppling toward Arcturus, toward a burning sun-grave where their light would shine forever.

  There were those who remained behind. There were those who made Earth their business and stayed at home. Their tribes were numbered at two billion souls. And they were somehow different from the spacers. They liked to sit in their rocking chairs. They liked prettiness and a one-hundred-cent dollar. They voted for the Conservative Party. They abolished centralization. Eventually they abolished government. And for the first time in anyone’s memory, there was peace on Earth, good will among men.

  My Master was hungry for land. My Master sought new worlds. And we found them.

  There was a yellow sun in Serpens called 27 Lambda, lying eight parsecs inward toward the galactic heartland and seven parsecs north toward the galactic pole. A lush green planet drifted at one hundred twenty megamiles from the friendly sun-star, and it awoke in the wandering biped nostalgic thoughts. We paused in space-black, we looked, we came down on tongues of lightning from the clear sky to set jet-fires in the grassy plain near a river and a forest.

  Man was a seed replanted.

  He wandered away from the sky-chariot and drank from a pool in the jungle. A behemoth with several legs and a parasite-rider came roaring his appetite at the pale biped. And his bones lay whitening in the sun, and his descendants learned that it was easier to stay alive by ignoring the biped from the sky.

  I lay rusting in the rain. Houses of log and stone grew up on the hillsides. They crumbled slowly into ruin. A man wearing a fur robe came and built an altar at my feet. He burnt his eldest daughter on it while he sang a battle song and danced, danced a victory under strange sky.

  The sons of men molded clay and chipped arrowheads and built fires. The old men told them stories of a space-going god, and the stories became their legends. They kidnapped the daughters of neighbors, knew wives, and multiplied.

  A glacier came and ground me into dust. Millenniums passed, and each Prophet had his Bazar.

  One of the prophets wrote an energy equation. Men crucified an Agitator on a telegraph pole. They purged a minority-group. They split a uranium atom into atoms of strontium and xenon. They wrote immortal lines deploring war while they invented better ways to wage it. They refashioned a body for my life-principle, for the tensor-transformers that constitute my soul. They mounted me again in a sky-borne prairie schooner because they were weary of sanctified braying.

  There were growling columns of blue-white fire in the night, and growling voices of restless masses of men. Men darted along the road around space.

  Men departed for other stars. But after a thousand years, many remained on the planet of their birth—homebodies and movie-idols and morticians, nembutal-addicts and advocates of world-government.

  When the restless ones, the wild-eyed spacers were gone, the addicts got religion and the federalists became placid anarchists and the Parliaments voted themselves out of existence. There was peace of the third planet of 27 Lambda Serpentis, and good will among the inhabit-ants thereof. They made love and studied sociology under a friendly sun, under a pleasant blue sky forever.

  On the road around space, my Master hungered for land.

  And there was a yellow sun in the region of the Scorpion, and once it had been called 18 Scorpii, but now they named it Ba’Lagan. It was a little south of Serpens, a little nearer to the galactic nucleus. They named its planets Albrasa and Nynfi, and they were twins. Albrasa was already populated by a clan of hairy intellectuals with teeth and twittering voices. They liked the flavor of man-flesh, digested it easily.

  Man came down on sky-lightning. Man came down to walk on the land and own it. I lay quietly rusting in the rain.

  Man taught his grandson to hammer virgin copper into a vicious battle-ax, and taught him the mystic recipe for roasting a hairy intellectual. It was forbidden to boil a young intellectual in the milk of its mother, but it was permissible to roast it alive and remind it that its fathers had dared to attack a two-legged god.

  Man’s grandson waxed strong and malicious. He committed genocide on the furry natives and used their skins for blankets. He shattered their braincases and erected his own altars in their temples. He butchered an octogenarian on one of the altars, because the old man had made the silly suggestion that they sacrifice a perfectly healthy young virgin to their god. The young virgin watched the ceremony with quietly triumphant eyes; then she married the chief priest and bore him many children.


  The biped bludgeoned the planet into submission. He assured himself that he was the Chosen Child of the Most High. He built himself a throne and sat upon it—while he listened to a newscaster describe jet-battles over the North Pole. Centuries wandered by, decked in gaudy robes. And there was a war with Nynfi between the worlds.

  And then another Abraham Jolie bent over his drawing board. Another crew of big-fisted men wrapped steel flesh around my principle. Another race of men spat contempt on the soil—the soil that had drunk the blood of their fathers, felt the fire of the suns as the rockets heaved skyward bearing my body and the bodies of my Master.

  Men were steel-jacketed motes of flesh, scurrying among the stars. Men were as dust, rolling across the galactic prairie—bits of dandelion fluff whirling in a rising tempest that bore them along the arm of the galactic spiral and inward, ever inward. Their eyes were on Hercules and the far distant globular clusters. He paused at Nu Lupi and 15 Sagittea and a nameless yellow sun in Ophiuchus where he met a native race who dared to be bipeds. He crushed them quickly.

  There were always those who remained behind, lingered on the planets where their ancestors had fought. I watched them with my last eyes as the last ship hurtled into space. I watched, and saw the lust go out of them, saw them become as a cauldron removed from the fire. Their boiling waned to a simmer, and they cooled. They always found peace when the spacers were gone.

  This I have never understood. I, the machine, the space-spider, cannot understand. But I have seen it—the exodus of the hungry, the settling of peace over those who chose to linger. The hungry drink of the emptiness of space, and their hunger grows. The placid eat of the earth, and find peace, yet somehow—they seem to die a little.

  Ever deeper pressed the starships, deeper into Sagittarius and Scorpius, and Lupus, Ophiuchus and Sagitta. Now and then they paused to colonize and conquer. A planet devoured a handful of men and tormented them with its biological devices. But the men grew and beat the savage planet into a slave after long ages, forced it to pay tribute to its king. Once more they coveted the stars. Once more they darted heavenward, leaving reluctant brothers in peace.