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home planet since you married Gopal. I
7
always knew that
Brian
W.
Aldiss
19
bastard was no good, worming his way in between us. Tell him I bear him no
malice, as long as he's taking care of you, whatever else he does/
She said: 'I sent you love wherever you are. I think about you a lot . . /
1 hope he's made you forget all about me. He owes me that. You and I were once
all in all to each other, and life's never been as happy for me again,
whatever I pretend to others/
'You said well, you know what you said, but I hope you still care. I want you
to care, because I do care for you . . .
Not only do I care, but I will try to show more of my inner feelings in
future. Perhaps I understand you better now/
'Jean, my darling, it's Chris, speaking to you after all this long time. I
hardly know whether I ought to, but I must/
I turned away. At least I understood. Only the incomprehensible things of
which the images spoke had concealed the truth from me for so long.
The images could converse, triggered by pauses in each other's monologues. But
what they had to say had been programmed before they met. Each had a role to
play and was unable to transcend it by a hairbreadth. No matter what the other
image might say, they could not reach beyond what was predetermined. The
female, with less to say than the male, had run out of talk first and simply
begun her chatter over again.
Jean's holocap had been made some fifteen years before Mailer's. She was
talking from a time when they were still married, he from a time some years
after their divorce. Their images spoke completely at odds there had never
been a dialogue between them . . .
These trivial resolutions passed through my mind and were gone.
Greater things occupied me.
Second Era man had passed, with all his bustling possessive affairs.
The godly Korlevalulaw too had passed away. Or so we thought. We were
surrounded by their creations, but of the
Korlevalulaw themselves there was not a sign.
We could no more see a sign of them than Jean and Mailer could see a sign of
me, although they had responded in their own way . . .
My function as a Prime Emplastic Seeker was more than fulfilled. I had made an
ultimate whole greater than the parts. I
had found what my joking friend called 'the secret of the universe'.
20
Appearance of Life
Like the images I had observed, the galactic human race was merely a
projection. The Korlevalulaw had created us not as a genuine creation with
free will, but as some sort of a reproduction.
There would never be proof of that, only intuition. I had learned to trust my
intuition. As with those imprisoned images, the human species was gradually
growing fainter, less able to hear the programmed responses. As with those
imprisoned images, we were all drifting further apart, losing definition. As
with those imprisoned images, we were doomed to root through the debris of the
past, because copies can have no creative future.
Here was my one gigantic simplification, here my union with the encompassing
universel This was the flowering
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before the decline.
No, my idea was nonsense! A fit had seized me! My deductions were utterly
unfounded. I knew there was no ultimate
'secret of the universe' and in any case, supposing humanity to be merely a
construct of the Korlevalulaw: who then
'constructed' the Korlevalulaw? The prime question was merely set back one
step.
But for every level of existence there is a key to its central enigma. Those
keys enable life-forms to ascend the scale of life or to reach an impasse to
flourish or to become extinct.
I had found a key which would cause the human species to wither and die. Ours
was merely an umwelt, not a universe.
I left the museum. I flew my ship away from Norma. I did not head back to my
home world. I went instead to a desolate world on which I now intend to end my
days, communicating with no one. Let them assume that I caught a personal
blight instead of detecting a universal one. If I communicate, the chance is
that the dissolution I feel within me will spread.
And spread for ever.
Such was my mental agony that only when I reached this barren habitation did I
recall what I neglected to do in the museum. I forgot to switch off the
holocaps.
There they may remain, conducting their endless conversation, until power
dies. Only then will the two talking heads sink into blessed nothingness and
be gone.
Sound will fade, images die, silence remain.
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