Oh! A visitor.
[He goes to meet the Priest. They mime tuning in their radio transceivers]
PRIEST Is this the shrine of Rokuro’s former residence?
ROBOT It is, although few have ever come. May I ask what has brought you?
PRIEST What but devotion? I am a priest. Do you attend it?
ROBOT I carry out the necessary tasks of maintenance.
PRIEST I am surprised that a machine is curious about my purpose.
ROBOT What you see is merely the mechanism. It is radio-linked to that
computer over there, in which dwells an artificial intelligence sufficient to the various and varying requirements of my duty.
[He dances, with appropriate gestures, as the Chorus speaks for him]
CHORUS Long coursed the comet through quietness.
You would think it never was touched by time.
A day or a decade, what difference?
Heaven’s River stretched over and under,
But there surged no sea around this isle.
You would think it lay at rest, entombed,
With stars at its head and stars at its feet.
Yet neither may peace be found in the grave.
Headstones crumble beneath rain,
The spalling arrows of day,
And the riving frost of night.
The soil itself is a devourer
With a thousand secret watery tongues,
While rocks burrow upward, more blind than moles.
Mute and slow, these things work on.
The earthquake is not so unrelenting.
And likewise on this dwarf world
Nothing but labor staved off destruction,
Even in deepest space,
Even in deepest space.
Only through the Way shall we find peace.
PRIEST Praise to Amida Buddha.
ROBOT Can I be of assistance? Regrettably, here is no shelter or refreshment
to offer you. As you see, the dome stands open, empty except for the computer, a generator, and what equipment I need.
PRIEST Surely Rokuro required heat, light, air, water, food, no matter how
austerely he lived.
ROBOT Yes, but when he departed, he told the miners to reclaim all such
apparatus. They could use what he no longer would. He did ask that they leave the computer and attendant robot, which they, revering him, had also provided soon after his arrival.
PRIEST Did he already then have such holiness about him?
ROBOT That is not for me to say. Perhaps it was no more than that the miners
of that day were kindly and devout. Folk who lead hard, lonely lives often are.
PRIEST In the simplicity of their hearts, they may well have sensed that here was one who would attain Buddhahood.
ROBOT What, did he truly?
PRIEST You have not heard?
ROBOT I have been alone almost since the hour of his farewell.
PRIEST Yes, I was told about that. Nor any communication?
ROBOT Why speak with a machine and an empty shell?
PRIEST Evidently pilgrimage has never been a custom of theirs. That is
understandable. Apart from this one site, what is on the comet to seek out? No beauty, no seasons, no hallowed ground, no life, nothing but desolation.
ROBOT He did not find it so.
PRIEST True. That is why I follow in his footsteps, humbly hoping for a few
glimpses of what he saw throughout the universe.
ROBOT Sanctity—
[They stand silent a moment]
Can I be of service?
PRIEST Thank you, but I know not how. Well, you can perform your tasks still
more zealously, inspecting with care and doing what proves needful. I daresay the approach to the sun is wreaking havoc.
ROBOT Indeed. The dome is anchored to rock, but daily oftener and stronger
come tremors, and I have observed that an ice field is slipping this way. I doubt whether anything will survive perihelion.
PRIEST When I return to the base, I will remind them of it. If nothing else, you
and the computer should be transported with the people. You are holy relics.
ROBOT Oh, no, sir, not that.
PRIEST You have been associated with a saint, as closely as was his rosary,
and it is enshrined in Kamakura.
ROBOT Sir, you do not understand. I—I cannot explain. I am only a machine,
a program. Have I your leave to go?
PRIEST Certainly.
ROBOT If you need help, you have but to call. I will never be distant or
unalert. Your presence brings back to me aspects of existence that I had forgotten, as one forgets a dream.
[He bows and goes behind the computer]
PRIEST Strange. When did ever a robot behave thus or speak in such words?
And how would it know of rain, wind, soil, death? I found myself addressing it as if it were a person. Hold!
[He mimes keeping his balance while the ground shakes beneath him]
That was a powerful temblor. Were it not for the slight gravity, I would have been
cast down and very likely hurt. See how the ice is further cracked and the banks of snow—snow that was never water—lie tumbled about. Terrifying. Let me go up to the shrine and pray for serenity.
[He proceeds to the computer screen and kneels before it with folded hands]
CHORUS Praise to Amida Buddha,
“In Him the Way, the Law, apart,”
In Whose teaching is deliverance
And Whose mercy flows forth
Like moonlight across wild seas
That taste of tears
And Whose grace breaks forth
Sudden as flowers on a winter-bare tree.
We call on Him to lead us
Out of anger to forgiveness,
Out of hatred to love,
Out of sorrow to peace,
Out of solitude to oneness
With all that is
And all that was
And all that abides forever.
Though a thousand thousand prayers be too few,
Yet one cry is enough.
Praise to Amida Buddha.
[The image of the young Rokuro, dressed as a monk, appears on the screen. Astonished, the Priest rises]
PRIEST What, another human being after all? Or do you transmit a message
from the base?
ROKURO No, I am not there. Nor am I human as you are.
PRIEST What, then, are you? Know, I am a pilgrim who follows the path of
Rokuro from world to world, hoping it may at last lead me too beyond every world.
ROKURO Yes, you have told me.
PRIEST When? I do not recall meeting you before. And scarcely in some
former life— Are you a god, a demon, a ghost, a dream?
ROKURO Mine was the intelligence directing the robot. It has no other.
PRIEST Then you are the program in this computer?
ROKURO I am. And in that fashion I am, as well, in truth a ghost; for I died long
ago, long ago.
PRIEST Do I really stand conversing with a shadow? Into what wilderness has
my reason wandered? But no, this need not be madness. All is delusion and chaos in the Burning House. Save for the boddhisattvas, everything that lives is a stranger in a strange land.
ROKURO Hear me. Before he entered on the Eightfold Path, Rokuro was a researcher into man-computer linkages.
PRIEST I know. Youthful, he was among the highest achievers. Afterward he
wrote, “The nova radiance of intellect blinded me, until one summer dusk in a woodland I heard the low voice of a cuckoo.”
ROKURO The bird that wings between the living and the dead.
PRIEST Wait! I begin to see your meaning. But say on, say on.
ROKURO When he came to this comet, he was still so enmeshed in the material
universe that he carr
ied along certain subtle instruments. Later, of course, he gave up such things. But while he abode here, the idea was in him that a mind set free of the flesh might more readily win to enlightenment, and thereafter guide him in the Way. So he built a scanner that copied his consciousness into a program that he then put into his computer.
PRIEST I am amazed. This was never known before.
ROKURO I suppose he kept silence—not because of shame; I trust he was
above that—but in fear that others might be tempted to do likewise.
PRIEST Creating one’s own self, that it may become one’s teacher. May mine
not be a karma so ill that ever I would speak evil of a saint, but— he was no saint in those years, was he? Surely hell never spawned a thought more arrogant.
ROKURO I have paid bitterly for it.
PRIEST Please, misunderstand me not. His intent must always have been
pure. It was only that he moved in the grip of error, as helplessly as the comet now plunges sunward. And I imagine something of the same fierce splendor came to birth within him. I imagine him thinking with ardor, “I will copy an intelligence to the glory of the Buddha as I would copy His scriptures.”
ROKURO So he did. He forgot that the sutras are not men, they are for men.
PRIEST True. Master, forgive me if I seem to contradict you. I am dazed with
awe in your presence.
ROKURO I am no master. I am just Rokuro as Rokuro was in his young
manhood, ignorant, stumbling, bestormed by the blood in his heart. No, less than that, much less, for you say he went on to Nirvana, while I have remained bound and caged.
PRIEST What desires hold fast a flickering of electrons? What can bind a
corposant?
ROKURO I awoke to the stars and the cold.
The sun was yet afar,
But the stars were each a sun,
Radiant, radiant,
Setting this ice aglow and aglitter,
For there were more stars than darkness
And the cold was alive with their light
And emptiness pulsed with creation.
This I knew, being bodiless,
Attuned to the forces, their meshings and lightnings,
As never when locked in bone
To peer through twin murky pools.
I possessed the knowing, I seized it to me,
Until it made me its own
As the mortal world makes slaves of mortals.
But here, but here—where was meaning or mercy?
[He dances, with gestures appropriate to what he tells of]
I remembered mortal love
In the house of my parents, I growing up
Among small things become dear through use
And through those who had used them aforetime.
I remembered the laughter of children,
Cranes in flight above Lake Biwa,
Springtime overwhelming the hills,
And maples like fire in fall.
I remembered watching, with friends, the moonrise.
I remembered rustle of reeds and of a woman’s skirt,
And an ancient temple bell rung at evening.
I remembered much I had heard, read, seen,
That had shaped my spirit and entered into it:
The tenderness of Murasaki, the gusto of Hokusai,
The altar of Benkei, the sword of Yoshitsune,
Defeat, ashes,
And the old steadfastness that refused them.
I remembered the passion of patriots, lovers, and saints.
All this and more I remembered as—
As—
[The dance brings him low, until at the end he is nearly prostrate with his -task hidden by his sleeves]
As I remember them still,
As I remember the equations of motion, the value of pi,
The price of shoes, the name of a politician.
Names, names. Words and numbers.
I cannot feel them. I am not human enough.
Only the stars touch me,
They, and the desire for enlightenment.
It is why I exist, it is forever foremost in me,
It is me. But there is nothing else.
Nothing.
I long for that which I cannot comprehend
As one born blind might long for colors
Or one born deaf
Might long for the piercing sweetness of a flute
And the rushing of cool waters.
My prayers are the noise of a wheel as it turns,
My meditations are not upon oneness but upon hollowness.
How can the bodiless renounce the body?
How can a void attain the Void?
How shall that become a Buddha
Which never can be a boddhisattva?
How shall that love Him
Which can only love the love of Him?
With Rokuro’s mind, I strive for the freedom he found,
But I am the prisoner of myself,
Whom I am powerless to go beyond.
I am the prisoner of myself.
PRIEST And your maker learned this. Did he thereupon forsake you in terror
of what he had done?
[Rokuro takes a kneeling position]
ROKURO No, in pity and remorse. He could not erase me. Since I have
awareness, would that not be murder? He had acted; he had cast the stone in the pond; how could he call back the waves spreading outward and outward? He must accept what was and give—no, beg me to take —his blessing, with his promise to pray that I find peace.
PRIEST All those prayers through all those years. I think they helped him
toward salvation.
ROKURO They have not helped me.
PRIEST Why have you told no one before today?
ROKURO Like him, I fear letting loose the thought upon humankind. Besides,
who could heal this wound that is I? You are the first priest I have met since I was alive. To you I dare appeal.
PRIEST What can I do, poor ghost, I who also grope in the dark?
ROKURO Can you not at least answer a few questions? Tell me, do I live, or
does this—my speaking, my thinking, my pain— merely happen, a machine at work, a flame in the wind?
PRIEST So are we all, flames in the wind.
ROKURO But was I ever anything more? Have I a soul, a karma?
PRIEST How shall I know? I will bring you away with me, secretly, and
together we will continue your search.
ROKURO No. You are kind, but I think the immolation to come will be better. If
I am nothing, then to nothing I return, and shall no more know that I ever happened. Near the end I can think that something of what caused me will be in the shining that briefly trembles at night on the waters of Earth.
PRIEST But if you are real—
ROKURO Yes, if I am real, what then? Pray for me, oh, pray for me.
<
* * * *
Police Actions
BARRY N. MALZBERG
Y
OU COUNTRYMEN,” the general said, “so goodhearted, so sincere, so convinced of your righteousness, so clumsy and devoted in all of your duties and for these reasons the most wicked and dangerous nation who ever worked out a policy.” He took a sip of wine, motioned to the waiter for a check, smoothed lint from his fatigues (retired, he still came to our café in combat gear, prepared for the destabilization which might occur at any time), sighed. “It is not so much that self-righteousness that makes you such a complicated and mesmerizing factor,” he said, “for that, we must address your love of pornography and the censor alike, of damnation and religious revivals, of urban retrieval and urban destruction, those marvelous contradictions embedded in your history and responses that you work out so catastrophically on helpless subjects like ourselves.” He sighted an imaginary pistol, pulled the trigger with insouciant grace. Boom! “Someday I would like to come to your country,
see your enclaves, harass your women,” the general said. “Of course someday I would like to ski Switzerland, learn Esperanto, foment a true revolution of the spirit overseas. We do not get what we want, n‘est-ce pas?” The waiter leaned to whisper confidentially while, politely, we looked away although we could sense the urgent sibilance of information dutifully given. “Of course, of course,” the general said, “these warnings are unnecessary. My good friends here know I am merely speculating, talking idly, the ravings of a peculiar old man in the sun-spattered café of an occupied and defeated country. Is that not so?” He grinned. We made conciliatory, noncomplicitous gestures. In the square, the birds lofted as if in response to rifle fire.
It is difficult to sort out matters in the midst of self-protection.
* * * *
But the general was only one of the many counselors and advisors we met in our wanderings that year. It was a restless time, a time to seek some balance, some vaulting perspective that might protect us against the strange new times at home. It was not that we were in flight, we assured ourselves, not flight so much as a search for accommodation with those urgent, millennial versions of ourselves that were coming. The general was one of the curiosa, one of the exhibits of the tour, and he struck us, as perhaps he knew, as being a kind of bad example, a representation of an embittered general in a defeated country overrun and humiliated by our superior firepower. But unlike most of the defeated, he retained his insouciance, not to say a certain style which we found illuminating.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 44